homemade yogurt.

I'm sitting here with a big bowl of homemade yogurt with local raw honey mixed in.. So I thought it would be a good time to type of a post about how I made the yogurt. Especially since I decided to scratch tonight's to do list. Just not feeling like doing laundry and cleaning things.

We recently started getting a lot of milk thanks to WIC. We don't really drink much milk so it's been interesting. We don't have to accept it everything that our monthly checks are for but I would like to try to put it all to good use if I can. I've been making sugar free kheer way too often. Last weekend I gave yogurt a try and I was so impressed at how easy it was and how yummy it is!

I started by googling how to make yogurt. I came up with quite a few different strategies and kept searching until I found one that would work for me, at Kitchen Stewardship. I had to reread the post a few times.. it's really long and wordy.. so I'm reposting everything that I did here for both future reference for myself and for you. :)

What you'll need:
Glass containers with lids
A large pot (that will hold your glass jars)
A dish cloth
Milk (any type you like)
Starter yogurt (2 Tbsp for every 4 cups of milk) (with live active cultures and no extra ingredients)
Thermometer
Spoon
Towels
Timer or clock

I started by sterilize four large glass canning jars along with their lids, a thermometer, and a spoon in a pressure cooker.

After letting them air dry I put the dish cloth in the bottom of the pressure cooker and put the clean jars on top.  I added approximately three cups of milk into each jar (I used a mixture of whole and 2% milk).



I did my best to secure the sterilized thermometer to one of the jars and I filled the pressure cooker with warm water to about the same level as the milk.

I turned the burner to medium, sealed the lid (with the weight off) and waited.  Every 15 minutes or so I peeked in.

Your goal is to heat the milk to 185 degrees.



Once it reaches 185 degrees you have successfully sterilized the milk.  This would be a good time to take your starter yogurt out of the refrigerator so it isn't too chilly when you mix it in.

Put the lids on the jars.

After sterilizing the milk it needs to cool to somewhere between 90-110 degrees for the incubation period.  My thermometer does not go that low so I shot for a bit under the lowest mark of 120.

There are many options available for cooling the milk.  I put the jars in the sink and then added tap water.  Unfortunately this cracked one of the jars which is why the water in the photo below looks cloudy.  Next time I will simply let the jars sit on the counter.  It will be a longer wait but I won't risk cracking a jar.



Make sure you keep the thermometer clean as you move it around during these steps.  Check the temperature of the milk as often as you see fit.

When it reaches the desired temperature (between 90 and 110 degrees) add the starter yogurt.  Since I lost one jar I was down to three (9 cups of milk, so I added about 1.5 Tbsp of yogurt to each jar).  Gently add the yogurt and stir.

Incubate the milk/yogurt mixture between 90 and 120 degrees anywhere from 4-24 hours.

I first put the pressure cooker full of boiling water into the oven on top of a towel. The jars were outside of the canner right next to it, wrapped up in the towels.  Every so often I switched the pressure canner out with a tea pot in order to keep warm water inside.  Keep in mind that every time you open the door or check the temperature you will be losing heat.  This is one of a number of ways to incubate the yogurt.

Unfortunately I realized that I needed the oven to make dinner so I had to make a quick switch, which is generally not preferred.. you should keep the yogurt as still as possible during incubation as the bacteria multiply.



I grabbed our cooler, lined it with a towel, added the tea pot of boiling water, nestled the jars next to the tea pot and covered them with a towel before closing the lid.



I let the yogurt incubate for seven hours.  After seven hours I had three jars of yogurt!



The separation is normal.. just like you would find in most store bought yogurt. Simply mix it together if you like.  Or reserve it for another use.



Place your jars in the freezer for an hour to quickly cool the yogurt and get a sturdier texture.

Overall it was a really simple process.  The incubation period was slightly complicated due to having to move everything. Bad planning on my part.  I hope to not break a jar next time.  Clean up is a breeze, your yogurt is already in the containers that you'll store it in.

The temperature to which you cool the milk and your length of incubation both influence the taste and texture of the yogurt.  Play around with it until you get what you like.  Shorter incubation will be sweeter.  Longer incubation will have less lactose.

Thanks to Kitchen Stewardship for the tutorial.  :)

twelve months / one year old.

Olive is one.

What can I say about the past year and who she is now? Wow... what a big topic. Where do I start?

More recently Olive has begun walking completely independently and rarely crawls.
She is constantly signing "please", which is pretty cool.
Her current signs are: milk, please, all done, more, water, eat, fan, book. I need to keep working on mom mom, dad dad, and a few foods. And some emotions like happy, mad, and tired.
Olive combines signs to make two word sentences such as "book please".
Olive can blow kisses.
Every day there seems to be less and less food on the floor during meals. And I think she's getting better at trying to hand us her dishes when she's done.
When she wants to be Olive is pretty good at using a utensil at meals. Sometimes she gives up and picks up her plate to eat directly off of it.
Olive really likes to give kisses. :)
She has not had any more teeth come in during the last couple of months but nearly every day that we go somewhere someone comments on how she has SO many teeth. So I guess since about 10 months she's had SO many teeth. Who knew?! Is 8 a lot?!
Speaking of comments while we're out - just yesterday we got stopped by a few people at the co-op who wanted to tell us how cute Olive is. Olive managed to get a piece of string cheese out of the girl at the deli counter and she told us that Olive seems so smart and polite. And the guy at the checkout kept going on about how we must have great genes, she's so smart, we must actually pay attention to and play with her. So I think we're doing pretty well. :)
Olive has shown some signs of imaginary play! The other day she started picking imaginary things off of Tyler's head and feeding them to me. Not sure what she was going for with that but it was cute and she was excited. We don't watch gorillas cleaning each other.. ever.. if that's what you're thinking.
Olive is really interested in sharing. She likes to bring me a toy, especially music toys, so that I have one while she's playing. A few days ago I walked into the living room and saw that she had brought a big pile of music toys over to Tyler while he was sitting on the sofa.
We finally have a baby gate for the stairs. Tyler built it since our stairs are rather unique. I'm going to paint it to match our trim color. Olive loves to climb the stairs.
She continues to point to to her diaper when she has to go potty or if she wants her diaper changed. Diaper free time is successful if I remind her to come over to the potty (every five minutes or so). If I don't remind her enough she'll go potty while she's doing something. I think she's too excited to sit still for long or to go back to the potty when she's interested in what she's playing with.
We're working on the concept of putting things back after playing with them. It works pretty well most of the time. I caught her putting something away independently without prompting the other day. That was very exciting. :)
Olive occasionally tries to put her socks or her leg warmers on but opening up the end up then giving up, or just setting them on top of her foot. :)
Olive really likes Honey. And I think she calls her "neeee".
She is still sometimes saying all done. It sounds like "ahl duh".
Olive is overwhelmingly friendly and social. Last night at the co-op she was wiggling around trying to catch people's eyes and waving at pretty much every single person. A very fancy looking wave too. We ate dinner at the co-op and she was trying to strike a conversation with the people at the next table.

The months really start to run together at this point so I can't really think of what else is new since last month. Overall Olive is doing so well! :)

I'll be positing something else later as a "year in review" kind of thing. How will I possibly summarize Olive's first year?! Oh dear.

Here are Olive's photos:



I thought wearing her party dress from the day before and the birthday crown that I made her sitting in the old chair of mine that I reupholstered with her sleep tiger would be fun.



She wasn't quite sure.















So she got up.



And ate her tiger.









And realized she was wearing a crown.



Olive doesn't really like things on her head. We have the best luck with hats that tie on or have a button. Headbands don't really work. Luckily I accidentally made her crown way too big but I think it helped... it wasn't tight! :)



And then she tried to put it back. :)



Ta Da!







And then she left so I spent some time with sleep tiger.





I enticed her back with her sleep tiger but she was content facing the wrong direction.



And eating her tiger.



And trying to get me.





Again I enticed her with sleep tiger.









And she tried to.. hang him up?





And then walk around in circles.





And decide that I suddenly need my slippers.











One more try for the chair?  Ummm... Nope.

Earlier that day we met our friend Amanda at IKEA for free breakfast - it's always free on Mondays. Unfortunately this was a Seize the Day weekend event in addition to President's Day so it was soooooo packed because they advertise that breakfast is free.













Having a great time with her new owl bib. :)





Olive seemed to enjoy herself. :) We got a few things in the as is section after eating.

I wanted to do something else like go to Como Zoo but Ikea took a lot longer than expected and Olive seemed to have had enough action for the day. We can go to the zoo on my birthday I guess... no biggie. :)

Happy birthday little Ollie bug! :)