Picking vegetables from the garden at 40 degrees

I feel like I need to knit this carrot a pair of pants!

Captain Crunch French Toast

Fresh homemade yogurt. My life is now complete.

I’m trying to remember how Mom did this exactly.  We made the yogurt last week and I’ve been eating it since.  I have been wanting to make our own homemade yogurt for months.

Start with a gallon of whole milk in a pot. You can use less fat milk, but we wanted to start with the whole fat experience.

Warm the milk to 160 degrees and then let it cool to 116. (I thought it was 119, but she remembers 116 and neither of us have the cookbook in front of us, so we’ll go with 116).

Once cool- add 2T of active yogurt per quart. So that was something like 8 tablespoons (1/2 cup) for the whole gallon of milk.

Then put the milk in a water bath. We put ours in quart jars in a water bath in the oven.  With the oven on low, we checked the temperature periodically, adding warmer water to the bath when needed.

Keep warm 6 hours. At 6 hours we put ours in the fridge, though I think they could have just stayed in the oven overnight.  Our yogurt came out a bit thinner than we wanted, so we put it in a colander lined with coffee filters and strained it the next day for a few hours. We ended up with about a quart of liquid removed and the thickest tastiest greek yogurt you can imagine.  Incredible.

Straining the yogurt

Eating the yogurt this morning with mom’s fresh blueberry jam.

Adobo chicken contest

Mom and Thomas went head to head in an adobo challenge.  They each made their best adobo- Thomas sent his with Jenny last week when she visited.  Mom and I were baking chickens so we rubbed each chicken with one of the two.

Here are the results:

They both won!

Swiss Chard

Fresh Bright Lights Swiss Chard from the garden- ready for eating!

A little traveler comes inside with the swiss chard

Hot Chai

Hot Chai!

James made perfect wonderful chai this weekend using our Kenyan tea leaves I brought back last year.  I didn’t have my tea masala spices so he made it up with some cardamom and sugar.

What do you do with a whole mess of basil?

We were headed to Mom’s for the weekend because Jenny was in town for a full weekend of cooking and eating and relaxing- so we cleared out our entire basil patch from the garden. There were rumors that there was going to be a snow shower this weekend and I was worried that the basil would freeze before we could use it all.  Turns out that it DID snow not far from our house this weekend.  The hell!

Before we headed up to  Cecil County, we went out in the ice cold rain and filled up an entire ice chest with basil plants.  On Saturday afternoon, we cleared out some space in the kitchen and started pulling leaves off the stalks.

Not very exciting work- but it made the kitchen smell great!

The leftover stalks got sent to the compost pile in the back yard.

We washed and spun out all the fresh leaves.  We used a few cups of leaves to make Basil Olive Oil, following this recipe from my brother in law’s blog, Thomas the Accidental Gourmet.

The finished product.  Fortunately, we had a bit of French bread left over and finished it off by dipping it in the basil olive oil.  So tasty.

With the remaining basil, we wanted to successfully freeze enough basil so we’d have basil all winter.  We’ve tried (unsuccessfully) freezing basil before in ice but this year I decided that we should make little basil ice cubes.  So we combined the basil and olive oil in the food processor…

and filled the ice cube trays.

Genius!  After an overnight in the freezer, we popped them out and stored them in a gallon bag in the freezer.  They held up pretty well and are ready for all kinds of creative cooking this winter!