Eat Your Curds and Whey

After living in virtually dairy-free Thailand for three years, I returned Stateside to find that I was utterly intolerant. Intolerant of lactose, that is. Eating dairy left me doubled over with cramps. I soldiered on, vowing to make myself, well, less intolerant.

Six years on, I can eat most cheeses and even some ice creams sans problems. Milk? Bad idea. When I found out I was knocked up this past spring, I amped up the calcium supplement. Still, I was worried that this little bugger was sapping all the calcium I was ingesting and then some.

And so began the yogurt experiments. I'd had bad experiences eating yogurt in the past so I was reluctant to try again. But after making it through a few small, handy containers of the good stuff without any problems, I decided yogurt was safe. Perhaps I'd just had bad yogurt (i.e. that with milk solids in it) in the past or maybe my bad reactions had been coincidental... or psychological.

Since spring the old man and I have been plowing through containers and containers of yogurt like nobody's business. I was making trips to the co-op just to buy yogurt: large tubs of vanilla for my morning cereal and a variety of smaller, fruit-bottomed ones for our snack through the day. Unfortunately, this was costing not just us but the environment. The number 5 on the bottoms of the white plastic might have been "666": the mark of the unrecyclable.

Just as I was beginning to lose faith that we'd never find a way to feed our craving in an eco-friendly way, my mother-in-law brought a copy of the Star Tribune with an article about making your own yogurt. After I let the article float around from pile to pile of junk in our house and to appropriately needle my guilty conscience, I pulled it out, checked the directions and bought the two ingredients I needed for yogurt: milk and a small container of plain, sweetener, and stabilizer-free yogurt.

I opted for the unhomogenized milk in the glass bottles and "Cultural Revolution" yogurt. My first batches, I've made with whole milk because it seems to be the easiest. Well, turns out making yogurt is pretty easy in general.



I boiled a quart of the milk in a saucepan until bubbles began to form (about 180 to 190 degrees). Then I waited. And waited. I needed the milk to cool to about 115 to 200 degrees -- or, as some recipes indicate, until I was able to stick my little finger in there for ten seconds without burning it. Since I only have two pinky fingers, I prefer to use a candy thermometer.

(You might be able to see the bubbles forming in this picture if you look closely.)

Once cooled, I removed about 1/2 cup (I used one ladle full) of the warm milk to a bowl and stirred in about 1/2 cup of the yogurt (some recipes suggest only a few tablespoons are needed). I mixed well and then slowly added it back into the saucepan of warm milk, combining well.



I poured the milk/ yogurt combo into a large quart glass container (there was a little left for one smaller pint container), covered, and set it on top of my fridge wrapped in dishtowels. No need for a fancy yogurt incubator! I left it there overnight and in the morning: voila! Yogurt. I poured off the whey and put the containers in the fridge. The longer it sits in there, the more tart it becomes. Now that I have my own yogurt, I can just set aside a little bit each time to use to make the next batch -- so they only thing I have to buy is the milk. I've done two batches now and both have worked out great -- perfect with granola and fresh fruit in the morning and now that my yogurt is in handy glass containers, I don't have to worry about the waste! For the husband, I mixed some up with some berries and some honey for a little container on the go. (Although fresh fruit does make homemade yogurt a little runny.)

Next up: experimenting with lower fat content milk and making strawberry-flavored kefir (a yogurt drink) for my husband.

Weekend Project

The old man kindly installed a retractable clothesline in our backyard and laundry has now become one of my favorite things to do. OK, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but hanging clothes out does remind me of when I lived in Thailand. Except for that then we didn't have any electricity or running water so we washed our clothes by hand and hung them to dry because there was no other choice, not for the fresh smell and to save a few bucks a month. Still, there's something deeply satisfying about hanging out clothes to dry. 

I feel like I should have a big wicker basket, wear a "housedress" and tie my hair up with a scarf to fully inhabit the quaint vision. The only down side is that we miss out on the extra benefit of the lint trap on the dryer: somehow it sucks up all the little white hairs that cover our clothes (the source of which can be seen in the lower left hand corner of the second picture -- sort of like that photo of Elvis where he's sitting inside the screen door of his house at his own funeral).

I Should Not Be This Excited About Soap Scum Removal... But I Am

With the bathroom being the one newly and entirely completed room in our house, it gets treated something like a family member... or at least a loved and lovable pet. We look forward to seeing it in the morning. We clean it lovingly. We train ourselves on best bathroom maintenance practices. After months of using our tiny, dark temporary basement shower, the new upstairs shower is something of a jewel in our bathroom crown. The sleek new glass doors are a point of pride and allow sunlight to stream onto our carefully selected tile.

And so it has been the thorn in my side to watch thin filmy layers of soap scum build up on the glass doors as the days and weeks have passed. The thickening layer has blocked the light and generally disrupted the morning ritual of standing under the warm rain-like stream of water from our low-flow shower head. It irks me.

Before I proceed, let me say that never before has soap scum bothered me. In fact, I probably have never really noticed it. When you rent, such trivial matters are the concern of the landlord or the next renters. I'd be out of there in a year anyway, so let the soap scum build! I had nary a thought for what would happen after years of soap scum build up. But now, owning a house, I imagined the scum, five years down the road, having accumulated to a thick mass that not only block sunlight, but space and the very air we breathe.

Soap scum had been the domain of those women in the commercials with the generic but well cared for coif who clean their homes in pastel button down shirts and khaki chinos.

But here I was, fretting over a clean shower.

At first, Eric and I decided that regular cleaning was the way to go. We'd spritz the shower with a bathroom cleaner and squeegee the door every day. I was reluctant to rely on such a chemically solution at all, but was even more turned off when I saw that it wasn't really doing much to keep the scum at bay. The scum was building and I was helpless against it.


I went on-line. I researched. I squeegeed extra hard. I read message boards and eco friendly housekeeping sites.

Some of the information must have entered my subconscious because this Saturday standing in the shower, I suddenly had the urge to rub shampoo all over my shower door. I started with one corner section. I rubbed. I waited. I rinsed. Sunlight streamed in through the glass. I paused. I blinked my eyes. "What the...?" I tried another small section. Waited. Rinsed. More sunlight. "How the...?" I gained speed and momentum. I hummed as I rubbed shampoo on the other sections. My squeegee slid easily across the glass, unhindered by the scum. I rubbed and I sang and I rejoiced.



It was all so easy. It was right in front of my face the entire time.

Shampoo (or at least this Aussie stuff that I've been using) removes soap scum from shower doors.


So now once a week I will rub, rinse, and squeegee shampoo on my shower door. I will daily spritz the tiles with vinegar to prevent mildew from growing (and update you on whether that works). I will shower and I will be happy.



PS Opting for liquid soap instead of bar soap also apparently keeps the scum from building up in the first place -- but we haven't quite gotten there yet.

Alternatives to Dryer Sheets

How did we get to this:

?

I don't like dryer sheets. I don't really know why. I think I must have read enough about how toxic and bad for the environment they are that I finally started to believe what I read. Sure they make clothes soft and sniffable, but they also give them that sort of greasy coated feeling. But Eric likes that they make his clothes not staticky and in dry Minnesota winters, static electricity can be a real problem.

As if I hadn't already read too much vague on-line information, I plunged into reading more about how to make clothes static free cling without using dryer sheets. One obvious answer is to air dry. I air dry some of my clothes but not all and not household items like bed sheets and towels.

Along the same lines as air drying is not letting your clothes get over dried. This means pulling out your clothes or turning off the dryer as soon as they are dry, thereby not giving static a chance to build up. Fortunately, we have one of those dryers with the "less dry" option.

To further prevent static and to (in theory at least) cut down on drying time, I also opted to throw a few tennis balls in the dryer. The theory goes that they keep the clothes separate and allow more air to move between them. I didn't time it, but my clothes seemed to be as fluffy and static-free as ever. Also tennis balls aren't made of PVC like typical dryer balls.
The one downside of the tennis ball method is that tennis balls have that same pungent, rubbery smell as bathroom mats when thrown in a warm dryer. Fortunately, I have a few lavender sachets around, so I threw one of those in. It nicely covered the rubber smell.
Should Eric find his clothes still too staticky, we'll move to Phase II, which includes adding a ball of tin foil to the mix. This is meant to reduce the number of electrons running errant through our synthetics.

Phase III is adding a quarter cup of vinegar to the wash cycle. Vinegar dries odorless so we needn't worry about smelling like a vat of pickles in our clean clothes.