Our winter sowing experiment is a limited success so far: 2 out of the 8 "greenhouses" have sprouts despite below-freezing temps and a mix of snow, sleet, and rain. The only problem is that our labels washed away, even though we'd used a Sharpie permanent marker. That, I didn't expect. I'm a bit chagrined about this, although why I should be, I don't know. It's not like I could have easily anticipated this one. God knows, Sharpie markings don't easily come out of anything else....
It's a good thing that 1) girls had gone crazy with their drawings, so much so that they didn't wash entirely away and 2) I'd taken "before" pictures, otherwise we'd still be trying to figure out what's what. We still haven't positively IDd two of them, though, and I'm not 100% about a few of the others.
Look, it's spinach (or "spinch," as one of the children labeled it) in a milk jug! In April, in Minnesota! Who'd have thunk?
Awww, little spinach sprouts, so cute.
We don't know what this is. Petunia sprouts, maybe, or perhaps lobelia? If they keep growing, we should find out in June or so...
Yesterday, I took up yogurt making. Oh, wow, this is so much fun, I can't even tell you how much fun it is. (Yes, yes, I'm a big dork, I know.) To make the yogurt, I followed this tutorial, brilliantly titled How to make your own yogurt. Super easy. And good, oh yeah, mouth-wateringly so! And economical, too. Aside from the milk and starter (I'll come back to that in a minute) I already had almost everything I needed to make this in my kitchen (pot for the milk, glass containers, pitchers) and garage (cooler); my only investment was a candy thermometer, which I'd been meaning to get for a while anyway after my old one broke.
Pete the home-brewer pointed out after that fact that he has a fermenter which would probably work just as well if not better for incubating than the pitchers of hot water and cooler. I'll try that next time.
The tutorial has lots of photos, but of course I had to take a few of my own.
Post-inoculation, ready to go in the incubator aka cooler. Pouring was a little sloshier than I'd anticipated!
Post-incubation and in the frig. YUM.
Thank you, cows of Cedar Summit Farm!
This yogurt is GOOD. It's so good, I don't think I'll go back to buying commercially produced yogurt. And cost-wise (I said I'd come back to that, remember?)...Right, I'm not going to count the candy thermometer into this since I've been meaning to get one and will be using it for more things than just yogurt-making. So, a half gallon of milk (64 ounces), plus a 6 ounce container of Stonyfield yogurt went into this batch of yogurt.
$1.15 for 6 oz of yogurt (about 19¢/oz)
+
$4.19 for 64 oz of milk -- organic, from a local dairy, in a glass, returnable container (about 6.5¢/oz)
= not-quite 8¢ per ounce for 70 ounces of organic, mostly locally-produced yogurt, with no sugars, additives, pectins, packaging or anything to recycle except for the 6 oz container the starter yogurt came in.
If I throw in the candy thermometer and pretend that I will only use it this one time for this batch of yogurt (which is silly, but it makes for easy math) then we have
$3.99 thermometer
+
$1.15 starter yogurt
+
$4.19 milk
= $9.33 for 70 ounces of yogurt, or a smidge more than 13¢/oz., which still beats the cost of an individual container of plain Stonyfield yogurt.
And like I said, this stuff is good. Really good. Really, really, really good. In fact, it's so good, I think I'm going to go eat some more as soon as I hit "post"...
POST!
2 comments:
Winter sowing? Kool!
That's awesome you made your own yogurt! My mom used to make it back when we were young. She had some kind of yogurt making machine which, as a kid, i figured was magic, but now i realize it was just an incubator.
She had some kind of yogurt making machine which, as a kid, i figured was magic
Hee hee, magic yogurt. That's awesomely cute!
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