We Bought a Farm: Making Yogurt

Firstly I should tell you that while it may appear to those of you who only know me from the Blog that I am some sort of pioneer woman, that is NOTHING close to reality. I am a city-girl attempting to fake my way through living in the country. Up until two years ago I had never cooked a real dinner (JB did all cooking). For the first five years of our marriage, I worked outside the home, and JB ran a graphic design business in the home so he had done all the cooking, a lot of the cleaning, and definitely all of the cooking.

But I've been trying to change my ways a bit. Mostly because I need to. JB works odd hours, and I don't want to not eat for half the week. In addition we are trying to eat mostly organically and get rid of junky foods as much as we can.

Our last WWOOFer, Eliza, taught me how to make my own yogurt. To be honest, I don't think my kids will eat this yogurt. It is much too thin. In order to eat it, I would have to do some draining with a cheese cloth and what-not, and I really don't want to mess with that. However, my kids love to drink this with maple syrup and I can use this with my smoothies which I drink every day for lunch.

I am doing this because (1) I can basically make it completely organic yogurt which is hard to come by in the stores AND (2) It is a probably one-fourth of the price of buying greek yogurt in the store which is what we have been doing.

Here's what I did:

1. Add one gallon of organic milk to crockpot
2. Cook on low for 2.5 hours
3. Turn off and let sit for 3 hours
3. Add yogurt (or use the last bit of your previous batch)
4. Keep off and cover the entire thing with towels and leave overnight
5. In the morning, pour into container and refrigerate

Here is a picture of my finished project: