Why would I make 24 hour yogurt? The difference in my health using 24 hour yogurt and some of my other bothersome ideas is just worth it. 24 hour cultured yogurt has much less milk sugar than milk, and I do not get along with lactose at all. I don't like it either. But I like lots of things that are made with milk, like ice cream, and if I use yogurt and sweeten with honey or an artificial sweetener in the ice cream, I don't go through the roof when I eat it. The yogurt culture eats the milk sugar, but it really needs to have 24 hours to do the job, which one is unlikely to find in commercial yogurt. Then you have something you can use in place of milk in recipes, and it's also low carb. I have made this from powdered milk too, and it came out surprisingly palatable. And it's a good idea to eat half a cup or so of yogurt every day to keep the gut flora happy. Therefore, those who have lactose intolerance could find 24 hour yogurt beneficial.
The first lesson in making yogurt is to have a yogurt maker. I have one that will make yogurt in two quart amounts and one that makes it in cute little one serving cups. "Surely a yogurt maker isn't necessary!" you cry. Well, I have in the past heated the oven to its lowest heat, waited about half an hour until I thought it was about 150º, and put it in there for 24 hours. It worked but it was touchier. Just get a yogurt maker. A cooking thermometer is helpful.
The second lesson is the starter. Plain Dannon yogurt makes a fine starter. I get the Yógourmet powdered starter online. A commercial brand plain yogurt would be OK for most people but people on the SCD diet should look at the two I use.
Then I heat the milk to 160º. Why? Well it needs to be 100º anyway to start the culturing. But if one heats it to 160º be sure to let it cool down to about 100º or it may kill the starter. Then you'll have a strange thing in 24 hours cultured with stuff from the air.
At about 100º put the milk in the yogurt container and mix in the starter. Put it in the yogurt maker and remember to take it out in 24 hours. Past this time and the yogurt begins to separate.
This can be kept in the refrigerator for surprisingly long periods, especially if the container has little air in it.
Another nice way to eat yogurt is to put flavoring in it. There are all sorts of nice ways of flavoring it. I bought freeze dried strawberries and blueberries, then boiled them in a little water and honey, and mixed it in the yogurt. It's delicious. I bought bakers chocolate with a high level of cocoa, no sugar, melted it, mixed it with honey and flavored the yogurt with chocolate. I have just put vanilla and sweetener in yogurt. Or eaten it plain. Sometimes one needs a treat.
Once you have made the yogurt there are lots of other things you can do with it, like making a yogurt cheese.
I also have made yogurt with soy milk. Why? Uh. Well, I just did. I guess to try to avoid dairy sometimes.
A friend of mine gave me a recipe for chilis rellanos which she said was authentic Mexican since she knew these things, being from California. Well, it's yummy anyway. I'm not sure why she felt diced green chilis were the way, and not whole green chilis. Possibly it depended on what was at the grocery that day.
But, as it turned out, when I tried to make this recipe I had trouble getting the ingredients. There were no green chilis at the store, and they didn't stock them. She used cream in the recipe because this is a low carb recipe and cream is low carb. They were out of cream too! I studied the cheeses to find the one she recommended - oh, here is it. Fiesta Mexican shredded cheese. It has three or four cheeses and it's delicious.
So what to do? I substituted some things and came up with my own version, which is not authentic Mexican probably. The store had canned whole jalapeños, which some people find too hot.
I opened the jalapeño peppers and removed the seeds and soaked the peppers in water a couple of minutes. I was also careful to remove the little stem inside the pepper that the seeds are attached to. This calmed down the jalapeños a lot.
CHILIS JALAPENOS A LA HELENE
preheat oven to 375º
one can jalapeño chilis either whole or diced (and either small or large can depending on personal preference)
2 cup package Mexican blend shredded cheese
one cup sour cream or whipping cream
three eggs
In a baking dish, about 6" X 9", (I use glass), put a layer of jalapeños, prepared as I explained above. Beat the eggs like scrambled eggs, then mix the eggs, cheese and cream together. Pour this on top of the jalapeños. Bake about 40 minutes.
(I don't use the tomato sauce in the photo.)
Num num num
Long, long ago the word sex was used mainly to divide people, and mostly anything that was alive, even plants, into male or female. On forms the word "sex" was used as a question, and the choices were man or woman. Should one wonder if this is true, one can look up the word sex in the dictionary which will document that it is.
Then people became more sensitive to the word sex, as an era of hyper prudishness swept the land. At least the land where people spoke English. As this prudishness swept the English speaking world, a substitute, more cultured and educated sounding word sprang up in its place, as the delicate subject of whether one was a man or a woman was reluctantly approached. The new buzzword was "gender." It sounded educated because it was only used in school, and even in school it was only used in language classes. What did it mean? It referred to masculine, feminine, and neuter words, curiously enough though, not in English, with extremely few exceptions. In fact, the word gender referred EXCLUSIVELY to words. To have a gender, one had to actually be a word.
I am not a word.
Parallel to this hyper prudish use of the word gender in the place of sex, a myriad of other long overdo corrections were made to the English language. At the same time that people were uncomfortable with the word sex, they became much more comfortable with using the f-word. As soon as it became frowned on to ever use the word sex, it also began to be considered to be ill bred to resort to describing people as men or women. For a while, also along ago, some refined souls referred to le différence as "ladies and gentlemen." And to refer to anyone as a man or a woman could be interpreted as insulting. How so? If you were a woman, and I called you a woman, and you connected the dots, you would see that I had failed to distinguish you as a "lady." Did I think you were not a lady? Well!! But then wasn't that aristocratic? Aristocracy is evil! Therefore a new way of walking on linguistic eggshells that didn't actually exist had to be devised. OK. Use the words male and female. For example, "There is a female in aisle 6 who needs an associate to help them." But there was a problem there, too, since usually when one resorted to calling anything male or female there was the suggestion that we might be talking about plants or animals, not people, because men and women were only human. If one said that there was a female in aisle 6, the question would arise in the mind of the listener about what form of female - dog, cat, cedar tree? In fact, it even approached the use of the ever so coarse word, bitch. No, not working. OK, just use the word "person."
People flocked to this solution, smugly imagining that the schoolteachers of the land would be delighted. And may I just say, the schoolteachers of the land is where this all started. Little dictators of a sort, drunken with power. As we know, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And so it was with the slippery slope we descended upon with the attempt to dance around any reference to one's sex, or even with being human, which could be extended to infer that one probably had a sex. Bizarrely, corresponding with the schoolteachers of the land butchering the English language, literacy rates began to slide.
But I digress. Soon it was pointed out, sternly, that one should NOT ever say such things as "salesman," "stewardess," "mailman," "bag boy" and so on. More new words must be invented. "Salesperson," "mail carrier," "flight attendant", "associate." If all these new pleasantries weren't obeyed, one would be corrected in no uncertain terms. It was just plain rude not to adhere to the rules! Only the un-schoolteachered among us would say such vulgar, primitive things.
Today we have come to the pinnacle of classy English by making it illegal in some states to use the personal pronouns he or she. This is tantamount to hate speech. And we all know that the whole land is a "safe space." Or dare I say police state?
And what about gender? Does that even mean male or female? Oh nooooooo! Now we have evolved. We have many genders. Many, many genders. To argue this point would go right back to the crassness of trying to define people as having a sex. When we speak of sex, in terms of whether one is a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl, one is describing the genitalia!! Good heavens!! Besides that, defining the being as being human.
And so we have progressed to the point that we have no sex, because we will not be categorized by either our genitalia or our species. That's personal. No one's business. On forms we are now asked our gender, and provided with a multiple choice. Beware though. If you agree to respond that you are in fact any gender at all, you have agreed that you are a word, instead of a human being.
STOP THE MADNESS
