Getting there.

Breakfast this morning consisted of homemade yogurt with fresh picked “wild” blackberries, homemade whole wheat toast and a pot of tea. The only way I could have done better is if I grew the tea (though theoretically I could have had my chamomile, but I opted for another) and if I made the butter on my toast (maybe from my own goat milk!) and if I made the honey in the tea, but I don't keep bees (yet). Give me a couple years; I bet I can do it.

But this brings me to my real topic of today – I made my own yogurt! It's something I've been wanting to do for a while. I keep hearing that it is really easy, but I was a little worried about making it work. It required keeping the yogurt at a constant 110 degrees for about eight hours. I did my due diligence and invested in a kitchen thermometer; I needed one anyway.

It just required some milk, I used 2%, and some yogurt to start it off. Behold – if I keep up on it, this is the last yogurt I will ever buy!

I heated the milk and mixed in a couple tablespoons of the yogurt.

Then I kept the yogurt mixture in a water bath at 110 degrees for eight hours. Keeping the burner on low with occasional checking and adjusting of heat kept it within ten degrees for the entirety.

It was still pretty runny up around the seven hour mark and I was getting worried that it wasn't working. Mike and I went slightly dejected into the kitchen at the eight hour mark, which was also bedtime, and it was thickened! It worked!

Then I left it in the fridge over night and drained off the liquid in the morning.

Now I have yogurt, which I can flavor with the various fruits around the homestead – including blackberries. Before we moved in the backyard was half covered in blackberry bushes. They are a weed here – the sides of freeways and the sides of trails in the woods for that matter are covered in blackberry bushes. They are one of our banes, in fact, because there are thousands of little blackberry sprouts in the backyard that we have to fight against constantly. The problem is, blackberries are delicious. We are trying to let a few of them grow along the back fence and around the cherry tree. And now it's blackberry season, so we have “wild” blackberries too. Yum.