Green Smoothie

Since I made my own yogurt, I decided that I needed more things to do with it than just eat it with granola.  So I decided to try out a green breakfast smoothie.

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I have heard a lot about these and following a basic recipe I found online I made one with yogurt, spinach, blueberries, strawberries and molasses.  The spinach is for added nutrients, and in theory you really can't taste it.

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Unfortunately my blender is not very powerful, and I ended up with some not insubstantial chunks of spinach in my smoothie.  It was mostly fine until the end when all that was left was chunks of spinach.  Mmmm yummy.

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Then I happened to read a recipe that called for blending the spinach and yogurt together first to eliminate the chunkiness.  Why couldn't I have found that sooner?!

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This method worked much better!

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I added the ingredients one at a time, so my blender didn't have to work so hard.

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It's a little bit hard to tell, but this smoothie is a uniform color, and chunk free!

Yogurt in the Crockpot!

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I was recently reading about making homemade yogurt in a crockpot.  We eat yogurt all the time, usually with granola for breakfast.  It sounded fascinating so I decided to give it a try.  I forgot to take very many pictures,  but the one above shows everything that I used.  I used this recipe, although I used my teeny tiny 1-quart crockpot, so I had to monitor the temperature more closely instead of just relying on the times given   The basic steps are:

1. Heat milk up to 180 degrees in the crockpot.  For me this took about 3 hours. 
2. Turn the crock pot off, keep covered and let cool to 110 degrees.  This took me a few hours . . . I don't remember exactly how many!
3. Put half a cup of yogurt (since it was my first time making yogurt I used store bought) and half a cup of milk in bowl and mix well.
4. Put the milk-yogurt mixture back in the crockpot with the remaining milk and stir to combine.
5. Cover the crockpot, wrap it in a bath towel and let sit for 8 to 12 hours.  
6. You should now have yogurt!  Refrigerate for 8 hours for the best texture.

My yogurt was a bit runnier than store bought.  We're about out of the batch that I made last week, so I'm going to be making a second batch today.  I saved half a cup of last weeks yogurt to be the starter for my yogurt this week.  I've been thinking of getting some cheese cloth, and straining the yogurt in a cheese cloth lined colander over a bowl in the fridge to get a firmer texture.  I'll let you know how it goes!

Christmas Gala

David and I went to the Christmas Gala at UP on Friday night.  It's always a fun event, with amazing food.  We got to get all dressed up, and I even wore my red lace "Ishbel" shawl!

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We wanted to get a picture of us.  I know that this one is kind of blurry, but of the 10 or so pictures that we took this was the best one!

Lego Advent Calendar

We enjoyed our Lego Advent Calendar so much last year that we go one again this year!

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On our first day we got a Lego Snowman!

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