Walking through Meijer yesterday I stopped at the yogurt aisle and spent a moment reveling at the fact that I might never need to pour money into that creamy, coagulated goodness again.
The thought makes my purse smile.
We shared a moment of silence as I bid farewell to the over-priced little cartons of activia and dannon, kicked up my heals in delight and moved onto the pasta and rice aisle.
I’m so over paying for yogurt.
Meet the newest addition to our family, er…fridge. This is Caspian Sea Yogurt, also known as Matsoni Yogurt.
Isn’t she pretty? She’s lovely, really. Sweet, tart and smooth, she is.
Here’s the scoop.
Last week we hosted Howie & Debbie Campbell, a wonderful couple who travel around the United States, singing and sharing their faith in Jesus. They were performing at 2 community events we were holding for church and staying here in our {actually, the bank’s, but we’re not going to go there today} home.
While with us, they taught us a thing or two about healthy eating on the road {and they’re experts on the subject, having sold their home and living out of their snazzy, suped-up van as they travel across the country}.
Debbie taught me how to grow my own sprouts…and then there was the yogurt.
Oh, the yogurt.
When she mentioned that they make their own yogurt, I was imagining churning and mixing and tending and sanitizing and boiling and other milk related activities. I was impressed and overwhelmed all at once. Cool, you make yogurt, how nice for you, Mrs. Crocker. You’re amazing. I’m just not that, well…domesticated.
But then she showed me how. She poured about an inch of their yogurt into my old {clean} applesauce jar, filled it with milk and propped the lid on top.
It sat out on my counter all night.
And low and behold, the next morning…we had yogurt. Real {live} yogurt. Real good yogurt!
And here’s the mind-blowing part. When we eat it down to that starter line {about a tablespoon of old yogurt per cup of new yogurt to be made}, we just fill that sucker up with milk again and voila! we have yogurt the very next day.
It cultures at room temperature…and it just keeps on loving you! As long as you save a little from your previous batch {to inoculate the new batch}, you’re in business. Or start a couple jars. We could have an entire fridge of yogurt if we wanted. We don’t. But it’s spiffy to know that we could if we wanted to.
I digress.
The best part: we will not have to buy yogurt indefinitely. Is that not the coolest stinking thing since, well…discovering milk makes yogurt in the first place?
You can buy starter cultures of CSY {Caspian Sea Yogurt} online all over the place {we even found it on Etsy} for anywhere between 7 and 12 bucks. Or you could just come and visit us with a clean quart jar and we’ll share the love with you, like Howie and Debbie did with us.
We eat it with cereal, we drink it in smoothies, we pour it over fresh fruit and drizzle it with honey as a healthy dessert, and even baked with it {check out the phenomenal Morning Glory Muffin recipe}. The waffles were crazy good!
It is rocking our yogurt-loving little world right now.
It’s like Amish friendship bread.
Only it’s not.
And the fact that we can now say we’re a cultured group of human beings is a nice plus, wouldn’t you say?
{don’t answer that}
