Northshore Magazine

November 2015

Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.

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66 | NOVEMBER 2015 nshoremag.com Erin Bligh sits at a picnic table at the edge of a rambling field full of grazing goats in Newbury, with her fluffy white Great Pyrenees dog, Adonis, snoozing contentedly at her feet in the table's shade. The scene is peaceful and bucolic, like some- thing out of a storybook: A bright yellow sun shines in the blue Sep- tember sky, warming a wide-open expanse of green grass, while the happy farmer contentedly watches over her flock. Bligh is the 27-year-old owner of Dancing Goats Dairy, which only be- gan selling its artisanal goat cheeses in May but has already started to make a name for itself on the local food scene. It's easy to see why. The cheeses are simply delicious, from the fresh-whipped chèvre that's sold plain or in flavors like fig and "eve- rything bagel" to hard, aged cheeses like the complex and earthy cocoa- rubbed tomme. She also makes sea- sonal products, like goat milk soaps and caramel sauce. BY ALEXANDRA PECCI A young Newbury native comes home to care for her kids and to make cheese. Goat Gal Erin Bligh opened Dancing Goats Dairy last May. To hear Bligh talk about cheese and cheese making or to watch her lovingly pet her goats is to witness pure joy. But goat farming wasn't always in the cards. "I went to school for French literature, so I was basically beg- ging to be unemployed," laughs the Newbury native. She graduated from Union College in New York in 2010 and moved home to a series of mediocre jobs. "I was sitting at a desk or work- ing at a restaurant, but none of it really clicked," she says. So at the suggestion of a friend, she made an unusual next step, accepting a kidding internship—helping to birth baby goats—at an award-winning Vermont dairy, Consider Bardwell Farm. Her accountant parents dropped her off in the middle of a snowstorm and expected to receive a phone call from their daughter desperately begging them to come photographs by Brad Mintz

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