Igenlode Wordsmith

I bought a date-expiring 6-pint container of milk from the supermarket (where I had gone to buy a fresh bag of sugar) because it had been reduced to 54p, and I thought I could use it to make various recipes. It wasn't until the next day, when I was cleaning out my receipts, that I discovered I had in fact been charged full price for the milk; I hadn't noticed because I was buying two butters and a giant bag of sugar, and wasn't surprised when the overall bill was nearly ten pounds :-(

So I was a bit cheesed-off that I'd ended up buying an expensive item that was going to be a real challenge to use up before it became completely inedible -- the moral being that you shouldn't buy things that you wouldn't normally consider useful just because they look like bargains! The irony being that one reason why I didn't check my till receipt immediately before leaving was that the 6-pint bottle was so heavy that along with the sugar I was struggling to carry it...( Read more... )

Having picked another pound or so of blackberries, I attempted to make blackberry cordial to eke out my rather limited supplies of squash. The result is a beautiful deep purple colour, but tastes chiefly of aniseed and sugar -- if I dilute it enough not to leave a syrupy aftertaste, all I get is the star anise.

( pastilles )

( yoghurt in plastic pots )

( gazpacho )

( microwave sponge )

The yoghurt was a pretty much total failure... again.( Read more... )

I tried the yoghurt yet again. ( groan )

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Poor romance-starved unworldly Valentine has become a proxy for self-insert Phantom-fans everywhere ;-P (And ironically she doesn't even know Erik exists; if she did, she'd probably be sighing over his grand passion with the best of them.)

Another failed (grainy) batch of yoghurt.

It looks fine when you peer into the Thermos, then when you decant it, it comes out in separate grains. I'm not going to bother trying to strain this batch as I shall simply end up with labneh again...

If my first attempts had come out like this, I shouldn't have bothered trying more than once. I've yet to get a single successful batch of yoghurt out of this second-hand Thermos, so I suppose it's possible that it's simply damaged in some way and I should go back to my giant earthenware pot — but I left the milk in for about 16 hours this time and it was still warm when it came out, and that's all that's required of the container: to stay warm. (It really is a pain trying to get yoghurt out of the bottom of a Thermos, though!)

The other possibility is that I remember now I tried to cut corners by dissolving the milk powder in warm water (which is easier than cold) and then adding hot water from out of the kettle, instead of warming the milk very very slowly as recommended...

I was given a beautiful soft and feather-light grey cashmere jumper for free because it had some moth damage. I very carefully closed up the small holes on the back using a dark grey cotton thread, and it really didn't show. Unfortunately the first time I wore it, when I took it off two new and larger holes appeared in the front due to the strain of being pulled over my head! (Which was precisely why I'd taken care to mend all the visible damage first.)

I've now darned up the holes in the front, which are three or four stitches wide, with a fine cream silk, but the darns are about a quarter of an inch square and very visible. Dark cotton would probably have worked better again...

Oh well, it's still as wearable as it ever was, and very soft and warm -- I wanted it as a under-layer anyway. More holes will probably appear until I locate all the damaged threads.

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On the other hand, I scored a replacement 1-litre Thermos to replace my broken yoghurt-making flask, unwanted on the grounds that it was dirty and smelt of curry. The silvering in the interior shows signs of wear, but the plastic parts clean up all right and the Achilles heel of the silicon seal appears to be in good condition. It doesn't need to have perfect insulation, as I only want it to keep the yoghurt warm overnight. It just needs not to leak.

This time round I tried putting my yoghurt pot to bed with a hot water bottle, which (and/or higher ambient temperatures overnight) resulted in a crop of set yoghurt similar to that produced by the Thermos method; the 'creamy' yoghurt evidently simply hadn't finished ripening.

This does mean that, as before, once you actually decant it into fridge-sized containers you end up with a lot of curdled-looking solids floating in whey rather than the smooth set disc in which it originally forms; I tried straining the remains at the bottom of the pot through a hair sieve, but it didn't work that well. (It wasn't fine enough to give clear whey, while a lot of the yoghurt got stuck in the sieve and wasted.)

I looked at prices for a 'food flask' to replace the Thermos I was using solely for the purposes of making cheap yoghurt, and they cost about twenty pounds; I'd have to save an awful lot of money on commercial yoghurt (and be a lot inherently fonder of the stuff than I am) in order to justify that.

So I did a bit of looking-up on the Internet as to whether it was possible to make yoghurt by keeping it warm in the oven, say, and saw someone suggest a 'Dutch oven'. And I had a brainwave that it might be possible to use my really big earthenware pot; I can't heat it on top of the stove, but pouring boiling milk into it would both act as part of the necessary cooling-down process and help to transfer the reservoir of heat energy to the pot. ( Read more... )