Homemade Challenge: Yogurt

IHC: Yogurt

You will need:

• a yogurt maker

• 1 quart of milk (if using skim, you'll also need 1/2 cup of dry milk powder)

• 1 cup of Greek yogurt

I think that all new parents go through a “quest for perfection” phase, especially when it comes to feeding their infant. Nothing impure will ever touch my baby's lips! So we reach for the organic strained peaches, the whole grain organic cereals, the gluten-free teething biscuits. For a while I made MM organic pureed millet, whatever that was.

It was during this food-saint phase that I happened to glance at the ingredient list for a six-ounce container of organic strawberry yogurt and saw that it contained 32 grams of sugar. Through a complicated system of converting grams to teaspoons of volume based on the actual food, I figured out that these 32 grams equaled 7.674 teaspoons of sugar. That's a heck of a lot of sugar, even if some of it comes from the fruit.

I know what you're thinking – can't we just go metric?

In my quest to abolish sugar from my baby's diet, I researched yogurt makers and lucked out when I stumbled upon the Cuisipro Donvier Electronic Yogurt Maker for $20 at a discount store. It has paid for itself a hundred times over; if you figure that a typical six-ounce yogurt costs 70 cents, and that to make your own eight jars costs one quart of milk plus a starter yogurt –-

I'd calculate it but V-Man took apart my calculator. Trust me, it's way cheaper.

Making yogurt is simple. The hardest part is the planning: This is a twelve-hour process, so don't start it at 3 p.m. unless you like getting up at 3 a.m. Take one quart of milk (that's two pints, or four cups, or 32 ounces, or 946.352952 milliliters). If you're using skim, add a half cup of dry milk powder to help thicken your yogurt. Heat this over LOW heat, stirring constantly. And if anyone manages to do this and NOT scald the bottom of their pan, please let me know. 

With any luck, your yogurt maker came with a dummy-proof thermometer that has lines saying things like “Add starter here” and “Hot enough! Stop!” If not, here are the temps: heat the milk to 185 degrees, then cool it in a separate bowl to 110 degrees. Little old women in Greece say that it's cool enough when they can dip their fingers in for 20 seconds. I am not a little old Greek woman, so I need my thermometer.

The cooling process should take about an hour; less if you use a cooling bath.

Then it's time to add the starter. This just means adding live cultures to your mix; i.e. yogurt. Take your cup of Greek yogurt and put at least half of it in a new bowl. Add to this a cup of your milk and whisk it so that the yogurt dissolves in the milk. Then add the rest of the milk and mix well. Transfer this to your yogurt jars. I find it works well to fill each jar halfway, then to go back around and add more mix. This way, any starter yogurt that has collected on the bottom will make it equally into all the cups.

We're missing one of the cups... it's probably in the sandbox.

Now you just set your timer  for 9-10 hours and wait... and wait. The longer it “cooks,” the thicker your yogurt will be. Still, don't expect your yogurt to be the consistency or the taste of the store-bought stuff, unless you're planning on adding sodium citrate, malic acid, cornstarch, gelatin and pectin. 

What you can add, to counteract the tartness, are a whole host of good things: jam, fresh berries, wheat germ, chopped nuts, vanilla flavoring... or, if you're out of the food-saint phase like I am, chocolate chips.

What's that? A Longhorn Beetle

This little guy, who joined our Unifix cubes for a math project on our deck, i a Longhorn Beetle. It was after we let him go that I learned that they can be serious wood-boring pests -- whoops! -- but it's highly doubtful I would have, ahem, exterminated him anyway. The Titan Beetle, a longhorn that lives in the Amazon rainforest, can grow up to 6.5 inches. Know what I would have done if he had showed up in our Unifix cubes? Yup. Turned the math project into a lesson on measurement. 

'Owl' about owls

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon the kids became enchanted by owls. We were at the library for a presentation by a local raptor rescue center, and really what the kids wanted to see were the hawks. When the presenter revealed two owls I thought the kiddos might be disappointed.

It wasn't so. Turns out they were entranced by the stories of these owls: One was blind and had wing damage from being hit by a car, and the other had opened its eyes to humans and was therefore "imprinted" to think it was a human. It never learned to hunt or behave like an owl. On the way home from the library, MM asked me, "Mommy, do you know what I want to study?" And I thought, Yeah, princesses, of course. Nope. It was owls. I couldn't get back to the library quick enough to clean out its selection of owls books.

Over a week, here are some of the owl-related things we did:

• Read about the lives of owls, especially the snowy owl and the barn owl, and painted pictures of them using templates at DLTK.

• Went on a late-night owl hunt in pajamas. 
• Went to our local science museum to visit the owls. We even saw an owl cough up a pellet just inches from us!

• Labeled the body parts of an owl using velcro-ed laminated tabs.

• Read lots and lots of books, of course.

• At the week's end, I wrote down everything the kids could tell me about owls and printed it out. Then we made a lapbook of owls using some of the materials at Lapbook Lessons.

Hoot! 

Homemade Challenge: My ice-cream maker affair

A goal for this summer was to make homemade ice cream with the kids. It sounded educational, not to mention yummy. However, this was one of those things, like dissecting owl pellets from a mail-order company, that sounded fantastic in theory but that quickly fell to the bottom of my enthusiasm pile when I looked at prices (have you checked out the prices on owl pellets lately? Wow). Anyway, when I was out running one Saturday morning I ran past a garage sale where there was an ice cream maker for $5. I begged the man to hold it from me, than I ran the last half-mile at 5:30 pace (honestly! I was kickin' it). Four minutes later I was the proud owner of a beautiful and brand new ice-cream maker.

Since then I have more than gotten my money's worth. My first endeavor was homemade vanilla ice cream. Instead of using the directions on the package I went with the more elaborate and multi-step recipe from Cook's Illustrated. It turned out beyond good. Smooth, not at all icy, and delicious.

Later that same week, I had a fridge full of blackberries. Now, we can only eat so many blackberries. What to do with the rest? Well, a quick Google search gave me a recipe for Blackberry Sorbet. I subbed one pint of blueberries (since I was overrun with those, too) and I cannot explain how good the sorbet was. I would post a picture but there is none left!

The only other thing I did differently was to pre-freeze a large metal pan and then transfer the churned sorbet straight from the ice cream maker into the pan. According to Cook's Illustrated, it helps the texture turn out less icy. Same with the ice cream.

The "What's That?" Hall of Fame

Gall on oak tree

I've discovered that I say "I don't know" quite a bit these days. What does a toucan eat? I don't know. Why do owls have yellow eyes? I don't know. And nowhere do I say it more than on our walks. It's there, outdoors, that the kids find the most confounding objects -- things that I have later come to identify, by many hours spent with guidebooks and using Google -- as various flowers, nuts, birds and insects.

The problem is I forget these quickly. One day leads into the next and suddenly we're staring again at a bug we saw last week and I'm trying to remember if that's a centipede or a millipede. So this year I've embarked upon cataloging everything we find with pictures. Here are our initial entries into the "What's That?" Hall of Fame. Pictures are below.

Used gall (I guess!)

1. Galls on an oak tree. Galls, I've learned, are the protective coverings of insect larvae, usually of small wasps. They are harmless to trees and can grow in leaves, twigs and branches. Once we figured out what these little reddish balls were we went in search of more on oaks around our street and found another gem: a used-up gall! You could see the individual larval pods (I have no idea if that's what they are actually called!) and the holes where the insects emerged. Cool.

2. Millipede. Repeat to self: Not a centipede. Not a centipede.

3. An orbweaver spider. This little guy (or girl?) has a neat spiral-weaved web attached to our house. I've watched him have a few meals, and what's really cool is that when he's nice and full his sac gets all puffed up.

4. Wasps. I don't know exactly what kind, but I suspect they are Bald-faced Hornet Wasps. They are working on a nest between our storm window and the pane (inaccessible to us, thankfully). I'm keeping track of their progression. At any given time there are two or three little worker wasps building.

Our resident wasps making their hive

Millipede (and a pillbug, for good measure!)

Orbweaver spider

Homemade Challenge: Adventures in canning

Canning fresh produce like strawberries and tomatoes has long been toward the top of my bucket list. Every spring I would think, "This'll be the year," and then after a quick Google search I'd become cross-eyed from discourses on acidity and pressure. I mean, there's a reason I'm not a physicist.

But this year I resolved that I would indeed make and preserve strawberry jam. The impetus is our subscription to a produce-delivery-service which brings all kinds of cool veggies, like kale and bok choy (actually, the kids love kale chips as long as I refer to them as "green potato chips." Bok choy -- not so much). But we also get strawberries -- fresh ones, picked the day before. Between the delivery and picking them ourselves at local farms, yesterday our fridge was sagging under seven pounds of berries. Can or rot!


So I kicked the kids out of the kitchen for safety issues (lots and lots of boiling water), put Dominic down for a nap, read through the recipe about a dozen times, took a deep breath... and an hour later I had four pints of beautiful red strawberry jam cooling in cute Mason jars.

Unbelievable.

And yes, I am totally going to make dorky red-checkered labels for the jars.

This old stump

Our yard is little, but I suppose that to insects it's pretty dang big. Recently we spent an afternoon turning over rocks, riffling through damp ivy, and checking the undersides of flowerpots for insects -- all in the pursuit of education, and not just because it was a heck of a lot of fun.

Okay, maybe it was the latter.

One of the greatest bug habitats we found was a tarp that had been cast on the ground overnight. When we pulled it up, the whole underside was covered with slugs. Delight all around.

But the piece de resistance was the old stump. About ten years ago a hurricane polished off a bunch of pine trees in our yard, and we were left with their stumps. Rather than pay to have them dug out, I figured they would decompose sooner or later. I was right! They were mushy and rotted, and -- score! -- home to all sorts of insects. The kids used butter knives and plastic spoons to chip away layers of bark. They found ants and termite larvae (kill! kill! kill!) and a bunch of other creepy crawlies, and we even kept some of them in a plastic container for the afternoon. Luckily the kids bored of "playing" with them quickly, and we ceremonially released them to return to their mommies and daddies (except the termite larvae).

And sure, I'm still missing a couple butter knives, and now instead of ugly stumps we have decimated wood chunks on which children or small animals could easily impale themselves, but was it worth it from an educational perspective?

You bet.