I finally attempted to make homemade yogurt for the first time. I had considered for a while, but the impetus to actually do it came because our milk was about to expire and I wanted to use it up quickly. I think I will be making yogurt more frequently now! Because it doesn't require much direct involvement for most of the process, I think it is worth the lengthy preparation.
I'm not going to lead you through the detailed process here, because I am just a newbie at it and am by no means a yogurt expert now! I followed the directions in this Frugal Girl post, so you can go there for a detailed recipe. For those who are just curious though, I'll fill you in on the basic process. For my trial run, I fourthed the recipe and just used four cups of milk to make one quart of yogurt. Basically, I heated milk up to about 185 degrees, let it cool to 120 degrees, and added a few tablespoons of store-bought yogurt (the starter - now that I've got it "started", next time I can just use a bit of the leftover yogurt I just made to start another batch). Since I wanted to make vanilla yogurt, I also added a little sugar and vanilla at this point. I poured it all into a sterilized quart canning jar, screwed on the lid, and placed it in our camping cooler filled with a gallon of hot water, where it stayed for three hours. Then, I stuck it in the freezer temporarily (I read elsewhere that this improves the texture), then moved it to the fridge, and that's it!
Initially, I was wary of this process because it seemed unsafe to just let the yogurt sit there in tepid water for three whole hours. However, as I read up on it, I became convinced that it is OK, because the sitting in warm water is really what makes the milk turn into yogurt; it is safe to eat I'm told. Most recipes let the yogurt sit for much lengthier periods of time, actually. Methods of keeping the yogurt warm during that time vary from using a cooler with warm water to a heating pad to a crockpot to a special yogurt maker.
I was pleasantly surprised to taste test my yogurt and discover that the flavor was very comparable to store-bought vanilla yogurt. However, it wasn't as creamy and it had a thinner consistency than store-bought, although this is common with homemade yogurt; plus, I used skim milk. Since the taste was still good, I think I will make yogurt more often! If left unopened in the refrigerator, the jars of yogurt are supposed to last a month; once opened, around a week. The cost-savings are great! I figured it cost me around $0.75 to make one quart of yogurt. I normally pay around $2.50-$3.00 for a quart of yogurt a couple times a month, so theoretically, I could save around $48 a year by making homemade yogurt. Imagine the savings if you are feeding a lot more family members than our two!
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Decorating with water beads
I've seen water beads used before, but I've never had any of "my own" to play with until now. They are so soothing to run your hands through! If you aren't familiar with water beads, they come in packets of little dry crystals. When you add water, they expand to several times their size into perfectly round little balls that hold water. You can use them for decorative purposes and they reflect nearby colors, but I've also heard that you can grow certain plants in them because the beads release water. Anyway, I got to take home a floral centerpiece from a banquet we were at recently, and the vase had water beads floating in it. When I topped off the vase with water a few days later, the beads looked like they had disappeared because they floated down. I forgot about them and was quite surprised today when I dumped the water out of the vase into the sink and there they were! They are supposedly reusable for years, as long as you rinse them off in-between uses, so I pulled some creativity out of the deep recesses of my brain to figure out a different way to display them.
Friday, February 17, 2012
A glance at my reading stack, part two
Same Kind of Different As Me
by Ron Hall and Denver Moore
Just knowing that a book is based on a real-life story usually causes me to become more engaged in reading it, and this book was no different. Growing up a Louisianian sharecropper yearning for the freedom of the white men, Denver eventually finds himself living on the streets in Fort Worth, Texas. On the other hand, Ron lives a very different life as a Texas rancher and fine art dealer. Through an amazing journey of redemption, their lives intersect. I won't give away the ending, but I rarely cry during books and this one made me sob (just ask Caleb!). I highly recommend it!
Don't Panic - Dinner's in the Freezer
by Susie Martinez, Vanda Howell, and Bonnie Garcia
On a complete different topic, I've found this cookbook to be the most helpful freezer cooking resource I've tried so far (although I have not tried many yet!). I found their tips for how to package and prepare foods for freezing to be particularly helpful in letting me fit more into less space. Also, each recipe lists the amounts of ingredients x1, x3, and x6 so that you see at a glance how much you need for preparing large quantities.
Just knowing that a book is based on a real-life story usually causes me to become more engaged in reading it, and this book was no different. Growing up a Louisianian sharecropper yearning for the freedom of the white men, Denver eventually finds himself living on the streets in Fort Worth, Texas. On the other hand, Ron lives a very different life as a Texas rancher and fine art dealer. Through an amazing journey of redemption, their lives intersect. I won't give away the ending, but I rarely cry during books and this one made me sob (just ask Caleb!). I highly recommend it!
Don't Panic - Dinner's in the Freezer
by Susie Martinez, Vanda Howell, and Bonnie Garcia
On a complete different topic, I've found this cookbook to be the most helpful freezer cooking resource I've tried so far (although I have not tried many yet!). I found their tips for how to package and prepare foods for freezing to be particularly helpful in letting me fit more into less space. Also, each recipe lists the amounts of ingredients x1, x3, and x6 so that you see at a glance how much you need for preparing large quantities.
Saturday, February 4, 2012
More Freezer Cooking
Today I decided spur-of-the-moment to do a bunch of freezer cooking. It was a good thing I didn't have anything going on today, because it took me 5 or 6 hours! It was time well-spent though.
First, I scanned through my menu and picked out recipes I already had purchased ingredients for that would be conducive to freezing. I also selected recipes that used similar ingredients. Yesterday, I picked up a multi-pack of chicken breast on sale, so I put it to use right away instead of portioning it out like I usually do into quart bags to freeze for future recipes.
Before I started, I sketched out my action plan so that I would have a sequence to follow in my preparation to maximize my time. At various points during the afternoon (particularly as I spent time packaging foods for the freezer), I wondered if this whole freezer cooking afternoon was actually saving me time, but I came the conclusion that it did. For example, most of the recipes called for chopped onion and/or garlic, as well as chicken, so I was able to do the chopping all at once for several recipes at a time. Handling raw meat is my least favorite part about cooking, so I appreciated being able to process a large quantity of raw chicken at once, then disinfect once, instead of separately for each recipe. A few of the recipes called for fully-cooked chicken, so I boiled some chicken breasts in a pot with water and onion so that I could both cook the chicken and prepare several cups of fresh chicken broth I needed for other recipes (I learned recently from The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook that onion is the only essential ingredient to making a good chicken stock besides the assumed chicken, water, and seasonings - you may as well save your celery/carrots/other vegetables for something else because they don't affect the flavor much). Preparing homemade tortillas can be time-consuming, but it felt much more worth it knowing that the effort was contributing to several dinners at once.
One thing I will do differently next time is focus on fewer recipes and make more batches of those. It seems like that would be more time-efficient, but for today, I was limited by the amounts of ingredients I had on hand since I had not planned ahead of time.
At the end of the afternoon, here is what I ended up with:
3 meals of Creamy Chicken Enchiladas
2 meals of Curry Chicken Salad (for wraps)
2 meals of Arroz con Pollo (Mexican chicken with rice)
2 meals of Chicken Tortilla Soup
1 meal of Lemon-Dill Chicken
2 meals of Honey Chicken
6 individually-wrapped burritos (to use together in a dinner casserole or to reheat quickly for lunches).
Additionally, I also put together an easy refrigerator cherry cheesecake and baked a loaf of braided Challah bread that won't end up in the freezer but is for our lunch tomorrow after church because we're hosting company.
That was a successful day in my book - thanks to my husband who did all the laundry while I was tied up in the kitchen and who washed many of the dirty dishes I generated!
First, I scanned through my menu and picked out recipes I already had purchased ingredients for that would be conducive to freezing. I also selected recipes that used similar ingredients. Yesterday, I picked up a multi-pack of chicken breast on sale, so I put it to use right away instead of portioning it out like I usually do into quart bags to freeze for future recipes.
Before I started, I sketched out my action plan so that I would have a sequence to follow in my preparation to maximize my time. At various points during the afternoon (particularly as I spent time packaging foods for the freezer), I wondered if this whole freezer cooking afternoon was actually saving me time, but I came the conclusion that it did. For example, most of the recipes called for chopped onion and/or garlic, as well as chicken, so I was able to do the chopping all at once for several recipes at a time. Handling raw meat is my least favorite part about cooking, so I appreciated being able to process a large quantity of raw chicken at once, then disinfect once, instead of separately for each recipe. A few of the recipes called for fully-cooked chicken, so I boiled some chicken breasts in a pot with water and onion so that I could both cook the chicken and prepare several cups of fresh chicken broth I needed for other recipes (I learned recently from The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook that onion is the only essential ingredient to making a good chicken stock besides the assumed chicken, water, and seasonings - you may as well save your celery/carrots/other vegetables for something else because they don't affect the flavor much). Preparing homemade tortillas can be time-consuming, but it felt much more worth it knowing that the effort was contributing to several dinners at once.
One thing I will do differently next time is focus on fewer recipes and make more batches of those. It seems like that would be more time-efficient, but for today, I was limited by the amounts of ingredients I had on hand since I had not planned ahead of time.
At the end of the afternoon, here is what I ended up with:
3 meals of Creamy Chicken Enchiladas
2 meals of Curry Chicken Salad (for wraps)
2 meals of Arroz con Pollo (Mexican chicken with rice)
2 meals of Chicken Tortilla Soup
1 meal of Lemon-Dill Chicken
2 meals of Honey Chicken
6 individually-wrapped burritos (to use together in a dinner casserole or to reheat quickly for lunches).
Additionally, I also put together an easy refrigerator cherry cheesecake and baked a loaf of braided Challah bread that won't end up in the freezer but is for our lunch tomorrow after church because we're hosting company.
That was a successful day in my book - thanks to my husband who did all the laundry while I was tied up in the kitchen and who washed many of the dirty dishes I generated!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)