This is a blog about Texas artisan cheese with a little side Caturday blogging.  I also tweet as @HoganFarms.

I am an adopted Texan, blissfully married to a wonderful woman and we share responsibility for feeding and lodging four loving felines.  I am a member of the American Cheese Society (ACS).  And I am a Browncoat.  Sometime you should ask me about my Fruity Oaty Bars.  Not mandatory!

I have two missions with this blog.  The first is to develop and report on my progress as a home cheese maker.  The second is to network and spread the news about Texas artisan cheese.  I will post information about cheese makers, farmers and cheese mongers producing and selling quality dairy products and cheese in the great state of Texas. I may occasionally mention fine cheese makers and mongers from other places too, but I will focus primarily on Texas.

Why is this blog called “Hogan Farms” rather than, say Homemade Cheese or Cheese Maker?  Hogan Farms was the name of my grandfather’s businesses.  Houston Henry Hogan ran a hatchery, and then a cattle and chicken ranch under the name Hogan Farms.  He was a wonderful man and I’m trying to carry on the tradition of the name.  If I ever get into business making cheese, that will be my business name. The graphic above is a series of pages from my grandfather’s hatchery brochure.

I am a WordPress newbie so it will be awhile before I can personalize this site to my satisfaction.  Besides I would rather be making cheese than reading documentation.  A couple of other notes about the blog technology: 1) to get back to the blog home page click the little red certificate graphic on the top left of the page, and 2) sometimes my blog auto-updates its theme and some pages that I don’t use pop back up (Home, Services, Portfolio, Gallery etc).  Please ignore them or send me a contact and I will get back up to remove them again.

The old blog had a header photo of me sitting on Suzanne Schmidt’s reading rock from The Lonely Wind on the Pecos River near Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I know it doesn’t have anything to do with cheese, it’s just the best shot I could find to match the old WordPress template.  During a winter holiday trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico we drove over to the Pecos River to look up a location from The Lonely Wind, but I didn’t have the book with me.  My wife was uncertain that we had found the right place.   I grabbed a Dirk Pitt novel from my bag and jumped out to the rock so she could get a picture for Suzanne to check.  At dinner that night Suzanne verified that this is indeed the reading rock, while laughing at me for sitting there in the cold while my wife took the shot.

Here’s the full picture of me on the reading rock:

And here’s another view of the rock viewed from the north:

Why do I refer to my wife as the CheeseWife™?  Because she didn’t want me to tell everything about us so I borrowed the name concept from the estimable Professor Glen Reynolds (Instapundit.com) who refers to his talented wife as the InstaWife.  Somehow HoganWife doesn’t quite sound right and neither does FarmWife, so I went with the CheeseWife™.

Thanks for visiting and drop by every so often for more cheese!