Lettuces

I will buy no more lettuce--for a few months, anyway. The winter-overs are lovely and rich. I harvest them a leaf at a time and soak them in cold water to plump and crisp.

Yummy.

So, I don't have much to say tonight except--I am eating those wide lettuce leaves, smeared with hummus.

I am drinking a homemade hard apple cider--one of the few left from the fall.

Life, while waiting to see if the gov shuts down, is quite delish.

Soup of the Evening...Again

Do you make your own soup stock? It's easy and the potential for delicious is fairly high.

Tonight I put some schmalz, carrot ends, a baked chicken carcass, the tough greens from spring onions (which wintered-over in the garden) into a big pot and simmered the lot for a couple of hours. I strained all that mess out and added back in some carrots (chopped), lots of onion, fresh kale and spinach. I simmered that another 45 minutes until everything was soft and the flavors had blended a bit.

It's the kind of soup that will age well--if we leave around to age.

We do like soup around here.

Getting Me to the Greek

I have a light dairy allergy and so I don't do a lot of dairy, including yoghurt. But a couple of months ago I had to do a run of antobiotics and chose to bring back the eco-system in my gut with some pro-bio Greek yoghurt.

It made me cough a little and gave me a bit of a runny nose but it seemed to get my "personal culture" back into shape quickly.

Plus, delicious!

So we did a yoghurt taste test around here to decide which brand was best. I found that the one with the best taste was 2% rather than 0%--no surprise there. But it was hard to find plain 2%.

Plus, pricey!

So I Goodled Greek yoghurt and found out that it's simply plain yoghurt that is drained of much of the whey, giving it that rich thickness. I dug out the out Salton yoghurt maker, gave it a very good cleaning and decided to try it.

I bought a half gallon of--oh, my goodness--full fat milk. Yes, I know. Crazy, right? I did two batches of yoghurt, draining each batch through a cheesecloth-lined strainer.

Friends, it is mighty tasty stuff. (cough cough) It works out to be about 35 cents a container, about the same price as commercial yoghurt and much cheaper than commercial Greek yoghurt.

Now, I want to play around with all kinds of milk and see how it works.