Category Archives: nutrition

Nut Butter Muffins – grain free

nutrition, recipes

I made these for breakfast this morning – they are great if you are gluten free, low carb, or trying to increase your intake of healthy fats.  They’re very filling and just a couple will keep you satiated for hours. They have no added sweetener, so the flavor is mild and subtle.

Nut Butter Muffins

  • 1 c. nut butter (I used organic cashew butter)
  • 1 c. sliced almonds (preferably soaked and dried)
  • 1 c. coconut milk
  • 2 c. unsweetened coconut
  • 3 eggs

Blend the nut butter and coconut milk, add in the eggs.  Stir in sliced almonds and unsweetened coconut.  When thoroughly mixed, spoon into well greased muffin tins.  Bake at 400 degrees for 15 min.  Depending on the size you make your muffins, this yields between 1 – 2 dozen.

Our muffin pans make the standard size muffins (not small), and two of these left the adult eaters feeling very satiated.

(This post is part of Fight Back Fridays.)

Avivah

How to make healthy recipe conversions

nutrition, recipes

I’ve been asked several times where I get my recipes from, but I don’t have one particular cookbook that I rely on.  Most of my recipes are my healthful adaptations of recipe calling for processed or low quality ingredients.  Something I especially appreciate about cooking in line with traditional guidelines and methods is how easy it is to convert recipes from any cookbook so that the final result benefits your health.  Once you know how to make conversions and substitutes, it’s easy to adapt any recipe you find and make a healthy version.

I know a lot of people find the idea of improving their diets intimidating and aren’t sure where to start.  I also know some people feel like they need special recipes that expressly call for the healthy ingredients they want to use.  I thought I’d share some basic guidelines so you can see how simple it is to improve the quality of your diet without introducing too much new and different stuff that the family may turn up their noses at, and easily expand your repertoire of recipes.

Shortening/margarine/vegetable oil – instead use butter or coconut oil.  This works wonderfully for baking and frying.   Substitute it in the exact measure for the unhealthy fat that the recipe calls for.  Cold pressed vegetable oils can be used in salads (I use extra virgin olive, flaxseed, and occasionally some others), but not for frying or baking, as they aren’t stable at high temperatures.  In my opinion this is the most important thing to get rid of and replace with something better.  Fortunately, this is easy to do and can be purchased at your local health food store.

White sugar, brown sugar – instead use organic sucanat (regular sucanat is usually glorified sugar) or honey.   Sucanat is easy to substitute for sugar because of its granular quality, and can be used in equal amounts to the sugar the recipe calls for.  Because honey has such an intense sweetness, you can use fifty percent honey for the amount of sugar called for (eg 1/2 cup instead of one cup) to have the same am9ount of sweetness.  Personally, my ratios are lower since I find most recipes too sweet for us; we use 1/4 c. of honey or 1/2 c. sucanat for every cup of sugar called for.  Organic sucanat is available at health food stores and sometimes found in the health section of large supermarkets.

White flour – instead use white whole wheat flour.  Nutritionally it’s the same as the darker whole wheat flour ground from hard red wheat berries, but the color is much lighter so the final product will more closely resemble the original recipe.  Substitute 7/8 of a cup of whole wheat flour for every cup of white flour.  I buy hard white wheat berries and grind my own flour, but you can buy King Arthur’s white whole wheat flour at health food stores.

For animal products – chicken, meat, eggs, milk – use the highest quality product you can find/afford (ideally, pastured eggs, free range meat, raw milk – but any small improvement in this area is worthwhile).

For any processed ingredients, substitute a homemade version or a healthful store bought substitute.  For example, instead of regular peanut butter I use organic peanut butter/cashew butter/almond butter that are pure nut butters with sea salt added, nothing else.  Instead of white flour pasta, buy a higher quality whole grain version or make your own.

All of these things are very, very easy to do – it’s using similar ingredients to replace the less healthful ones.   Small changes that result in major qualitative improvements in the final product.

In addition to using good ingredients, there are a couple of traditional preparation techniques that can be integrated into most recipes. I’ve written about several of these techniques in detail in past posts, and will just reference them here.

In most recipes that call for flour (quick breads, cakes, muffins), you can substitute buttermilk/thinned yogurt for part of the liquid the recipe calls for, and soak the flour overnight in the buttermilk or yogurt, adding the rest of the ingredients the next morning. Alternatively, you can purchase sprouted flour, that doesn’t require any soaking and or advance preparation, either online or at your local health food store.

When cooking with beans, soak them a couple of days in advance and let them begin to sprout before cooking as usual.

Cooking healthfully isn’t hard, and it’s fun to be able to convert any recipe into something that will nourish your family!

(This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays.)

Avivah

Free accupuncture

Intentional Spending, nutrition

Today was a busy day, a beautiful day of good things: a sleepover for my children with friends, a funeral, an accupuncture session, and then a skating party for a couple of the boys to attend.

If I can squeeze it in this week, I want to write a separate post about the funeral, which was inspiring and very special.  But for now, I’m going to share about the accupuncture treatment I enjoyed.  Because my dh takes our vehicle on Sundays to work, my mom generously offered to give me a ride to the funeral service, and then right after we went to have some accupuncture work done.

I had the pleasure of meeting Julie, the accupuncturist, two or three years ago.  She’s shifting her practice to community accupuncture, a process that allows her to treat several women simultaneously, and I got a message from her that she’s offering complimentary sessions for the next couple of Sundays between 2 – 5 pm.  I’m sharing the link with info because this is a wonderful opportunity to experience accupuncture by an experienced practitioner for no cost.  (Her prices are incredibly affordable even after these complimentary sessions.)  You don’t have to make an appointment; if you live in this area and are interested, just check out the link for the address and show up!

Accupuncture is a method of healing that uses tiny needles to stimulate pressure points in the body and thereby releases blocked energy.  You don’t have to undress; you sit in a comfortable recliner while the needles are inserted into spots on your arms, lower legs, and head.  (I had tights on today so I didn’t have the full benefit of having all my pressure points stimulated, but next time I’ll be sure to wear knee highs that can easily be rolled down.)    This takes just a few minutes, and then you relax and get quiet inside yourself while you wait for the energy flow to start moving around.  This was easy to do while listening to the beautiful and relaxing music playing, the only light was coming in through the windows, and it was very peaceful.

At first I wasn’t sure what I was waiting to feel, so I asked her.  She said it would feel like your body was humming or gently vibrating, and that it takes a few minutes to start feeling it.  Once I started feeling it, it was like a gentle tingling or warmth – an inner humming is probably the best description.  I asked how long it would take, and she said that I would tell her when my body was ready.  Not knowing what that meant, I again asked and she said that usually your body ‘wakes up’.   This is hard to explain but once you do it, it’s easy to understand.  The humming kind of stopped at some point and instead of feeling deeply relaxed, I started to feel like getting up and going home.

If you’re wondering about the set up, there are four recliners in the room.  Because of the angle you lie down at, the fact that you close your eyes when you are having your session, and the way the recliners are set up, you aren’t sitting around staring at anyone.  It’s very comfortable.

My mother and I both found this very relaxing and renewing, and plan to go back together the next couple of weeks!

Avivah

How to make butter

food preservation, Homeschooling, Intentional Spending,

I got a great buy on organic cream a week and a half ago, and this morning I decided to show the kids how to turn it into butter.  This is a fun and simple activity for  kids of all ages, two and up – it’s like magic to see cream turn into butter before their eyes!

All you need is heavy cream and a container with a lid.  I used a glass jar, but if you’re going to let a two year old do this, use a plastic jar, like an empty mayonnaise jar with a tight fitting lid. You can even use a disposable water bottle – it doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s something that will close tightly and be easy for your child to handle.

Pour a cup of heavy cream into the container, making sure not to fill the container more than half way, and tightly close the lid.  Hand it to your child and tell them to shake it until it turns into butter.  That’s it.  🙂  At first the cream will become whipped cream – we stopped and let them taste at this point.  Then as they continue shaking it, it will form a solid ball as the liquid separates.  This takes a lot of shaking – great to use up some little kid energy!

If you’ve used a narrow plastic container like a water bottle, cut it open (since the ball of butter obviously won’t fit through the opening); otherwise just open the container and pour out the liquid. Reserve the liquid to use for soaking flour or grains; pour out the butter and put it in a closed container in the fridge.

We gave each of our kids a small container to put the finished butter in, and after smoothing it into the container, they marked their butter with their initial.  I let my ds7 and ds3 make this first, and everyone else was so interested that they asked if they could also make some.  It’s a good thing I bought a lot of cream!  For the first batch we didn’t add salt, but I told the kids who wanted to make it afterwards that they could decide if they wanted to salt theirs, and choose the kind of salt and proportions they wanted to use.

My kids were wondering if it was cheaper to make butter than to buy it, so naturally I told them to figure it out.  🙂   But I’ll do the math for you.  😀  A pint of heavy cream yields a half pound of butter.  Since I bought the cream at the low price of .79, our homemade organic butter comes out to 1.58 lb, which is cheaper than regular non-organic butter (which is what I usually buy).

Enjoy!

Avivah

King Corn – a review

nutrition

A big part of why my kids are happy to eat healthfully is that they buy into the concept of food quality mattering when it comes to building up the body.  (It doesn’t hurt that our food is delicious!)  I regularly share with them things I learn about health and nutrition, and when I heard about this dvd titled King Corn, I thought it would be interesting to watch with the kids and reserved a copy from the library.  Yes, my kids really find this stuff fascinating – even ds2 and ds3 sat through it!

King Korn is an entertaining documentary of the journey of two young men who set off to learn about the growing and processing of corn.  It begins when they have their hair analyzed and find out that the carbon is their body is mostly made up of corn!   So they temporarily move to Iowa to grow an acre of their own corn and follow the ‘journey’ of their corn.

After finding a farmer who agrees to let them rent an acre of land from him, we watch them follow typical farming guidelines.  They begin by preparing the soil with chemical fertilizers, and soon after plant the acre (it takes just 18  minutes to sow the entire area).  When they spray for weeds, we learn that all corn would be killed by this pesticide called Liberty, except for this particular kind of corn (Liberty Link) that was developed to withstand Liberty.  It’s one thing to know your food is liberally sprayed with pesticides, it’s another to watch it!

Nowadays, the average is 180 bushels of corn to an acre, and 200 bushels isn’t uncommon.  That’s an incredible thing.  This is possible not because each plant produces more, but because they’ve been bred to be able to live much closer together. As I heard the discussion about current crop yields , a scene from the Little House on the Prairie books came to mind, when Pa was exultant that he was expecting an incredible yield of forty bushels of grain to an acre.  There was an explanation about current farm subsidy practices, and it becomes clear how crucial this is to farmers, since without it they’d literally be losing money even when getting record yields.  Farm subsidies explain the seemingly wasteful overproduction of corn.

Once the corn was ready to be harvested they tasted their crop, only to be taken aback by how unappetizing it was.   No surprise there, though- after all, it was bred to be able to grow in crowded conditions and withstand powerful herbicides, not for flavor or nutritional value.

What happens to corn once its harvested?  Ten percent is used for ethanol, and the other ninety percent is split 50/40 towards the corn sweetener industry and for cattle feed. It becomes clear that with the mega production of corn that exists in the US today, industries have developed which find ways to use it all.

One of these is the industrialized beef market, so they went into the cattle industry to see how corn is used there.  I thought this was a particularly important part of the film, since most people have no idea that corn is an unnatural and unhealthy food for cows that causes them to become disease ridden.  (I only learned about this a few years ago when I researched raw milk – what cows eat affects the quality of their milk.  Corn sounds like a healthy food for cows, doesn’t it?)  Once cows are brought into a feedlot, they are fed a diet that is almost exclusively corn, which is effective in fattening them quickly for market.  It also makes them very sick.  Don’t you think it’s obvious that just like the milk quality is affected by how a cow is fed, the quality of their meat would be affected?

Cows and calves of a local cattle rancher who sells her young calves to the feedlots are shown, and the difference between the young cows with their mothers allowed to graze and roam in grassy pastures is very stark when contrasted with the reality of feedlot cattle.  Enough said.

They then attempt to visit a factory that produces corn syrup but when they were denied permission, they got a hugely technical explanation, then found a recipe, and made it themselves.   I’m a do it yourself kind of woman, but corn syrup wouldn’t be on my list of projects!  Corn syrup is ubiquitous to our food supply since it ends up in just about every processed food on the shelf.  (Oh, by the way, here’s a couple of spoofs that the makers of King Corn did on the ads the corn refiner’s association recently put out to try to spin that their product is a healthy one.  Very humorous.)

Something I liked about this presentation is that though the producers clearly had an aim in mind when producing this, they let those they interviewed do the talking.  We see a corn farmer emphatically saying that the corn they’re all growing is low quality and he wouldn’t eat it.  We see the head of the feedlot explaining that what Americans value most is cheap food, and that’s what they’re given, that if they were clamoring for grass fed beef, that’s what the industry would produce (and I believe he was sincere and that this is true).  We see the pathetic explanations of the corn syrup representative as to why visitors aren’t allowed in the factory to view the process of how corn becomes corn syrup (we were laughing at how ridiculous the explanations sounded).  We see a farmer who can’t keep getting bigger and bigger forced to sell his home and farm after generations.

As they go through this process, the two young men become increasingly uncomfortable about their role in growing corn that will support these industries.  In the end, they buy the acre that they rented, and the final scene shows them playing baseball together in the acre covered with grass, with acres of corn all around them.  At first I didn’t comprehend the message of this, but then understood that the point was that they chose to leave it unfarmed, ie, not contributing to the corn industry.

Though very little of this was novel to me, for my family it was, and I felt King Corn was a valuable film to watch.   A short time before we watched this I said to my husband, “The more I know about food and the way it’s produced, the more frustrating I find it to shop and the less I want to eat any of it.”  He didn’t share that feeling and didn’t really get where I was coming from, until he watched this film.

Something all my kids wondered about was how the producers of the film continued eating fast food after learning all they did!  They also asked me if I thought that our family would be classified as consisting of corn carbon if our hair was analyzed.  I told them I wasn’t sure.  While we eat virtually no processed food, no corn oil, and no corn syrup, we do sometimes use cornmeal and eat frozen/fresh corn.  That, I think is probably less of a problem than the animal products we eat – corn fed beef, corn fed poultry (even organic chickens often display ‘grain fed’ or ‘corn fed’ on the labels), eggs from poultry that is corn fed (we try to get pastured eggs but often use regular eggs), dairy products from cows that are corn fed….

The unfortunate reality is that it takes a lot of education and effort nowadays to eat a decent diet.  Getting information like this helps with the education component!

Next on my list is Food Inc – I reserved it weeks ago and had 36 people in line ahead of me (that’s a record; I reserve books all the time and rarely have more than a couple of people waiting for something); I’m down to only about 22 people ahead of me now so hopefully I’ll get it in a few more weeks. 🙂

(This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays and Fight Back Fridays.)

Avivah

How to sprout beans

Homemaking, nutrition

A friend asked me this morning about how to sprout beans, and I figured I’d post it today – it’s easiest to get the quick topics out of the way so I don’t have to keep them on my mind!

First of all, a quick reminder about why sprouting beans is beneficial.  Beans, like most grains, nuts, and seeds, have phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors in them.   That means that even though we think of beans as highly nutritious, we don’t utilize a good part of the nutrients in them unless they are properly prepared.  Beans are inexpensive and great budget stretchers, and it’s worthwhile to figure out how to use them to maximize their value.

Fortunately, it’s not hard! Simply put the dried beans in a bowl, and cover them with water that is room temperature.  Let them sit overnight, and in the morning, pour them into a strainer and rinse them off.  The beans will have absorbed all the water, and are ready to be used.  But if you really want to supercharge them, them you can sprout them!  This significantly increases the nutritional value.  That’s what I like to do.

Now that they’re soaked, put set them back in the original bowl and leave them on the counter.  At the end of the day, rinse them.  I rinse mine twice a day by pouring them into a strainer, running some water over them, and then putting them back into the bowl.  For simplicity, I rinse them once at night and once in the morning; it works well with my personal routine.  Twice a day seems to be a good frequency to rinse them, but I’ve often been lazy and just rinsed them once a day and they were fine. To clarify, after you rinse them, leave them in an empty bowl, not a bowl of water.

As they sit on the counter at room temperature, the soaked beans will begin to germinate.  Smaller legumes will sprout faster – within a day or two you’ll see little sprouts appearing at the end.  Larger beans take longer- generally 3 – 4 day, but it really depends on your household temperature.  In the summer, the beans sprout really fast!  How long you let them get depends on your personal preference.  If you want to use them as sprouts in salads, then you’ll want to wait a lot longer.  I use them in cooked dishes once I see the sprout emerging.

Soaking and sprouting isn’t hard to do, but it does require advance planning.  I plan my weekly menu on Saturday nights, and then on Sunday I begin soaking my beans for the week.  If you’ve been reading here for a while, then you’ve noticed that when I post my weekly menu on Sundays, I usually post the preparatory work that I’m doing for the week, too, including soaking beans.  Since large beans take longer to sprout, I generally plan them for later in the week.

What is you’ve soaked your beans and let them sit out for a day but they aren’t yet sprouted – and you need to use them?  Even if you don’t see the germination taking place, it’s still in the process and you’ll enjoy the benefits, so go ahead and use them!

By the way, lots of jokes have been made about beans and their flatulatory (did I just make that word up? :)) effect on the body.  We’ve found that soaking and sprouting the beans takes away that issue!

(This post is part of Fight Back Fridays.)

Avivah

Kosher turkeys on sale

Intentional Spending, nutrition

Yesterday I decided that this month I will try to buy organic chicken, at least in part.  I’ve only once bought organic chicken, as a splurge.  It’s generally at least $4 lb, which is a significant leap in price, considering that I generally pay .99 lb for chicken wings and 2.29 for quarters (those are sale prices).  With the amount of people I’m feeding in our home, that extra cost would add up quickly.

I’m not one to stand on the organic label – when I can get something organic at a comparable price, I do.  I’ve spent some time thinking about what really matters most to buy organic, and my personal conclusion is the animal products because the antibiotics and hormones are concentrated in the flesh of the poultry/meat we buy, making it more problematic than vegetables.   So I thought this would be a good experiment to try (I say experiment because I have to see how it works in my budget).

I called a couple of butchers to ask about their case prices, and I was thinking that I’d need to buy much less chicken than usual and have more broth to compensate if I go this route- I have a set amount that I’m prepared to spend on chicken, and when I hit that number, that’s it for the month.  However, to my delight when I stopped in at Trader Joes to get my monthly coconut milk (they were out – but I ordered 2 cases so then I won’t run low for a while), I saw that they have glatt kosher all natural turkeys for 2.29 lb (certified OU and another hechsher, too).  These turkeys were fed no animal by products (animals in the industrial food loop are often fed ground up diseased animals), and are hormone and antibiotic free.  I was totally thrilled, since the regular kosher turkey runs about 3.29 lb, and this was cheaper than I usually manage to find regular turkey on sale! (Though I did see it this week at Giant for 1.99 lb- a price to stock up if you’re not doing my kind of experimenting!)

I asked the cashier about it, and she said they have their own line of (*edit*) turkeys, and only for the Thanksgiving season, they do a kosher run.  That’s why they can sell it so inexpensively.  They’re going to have them through Nov. 28, unless they run out (which they did the last couple of years).  I bought three turkeys, and will see if I can swing any more for this month after I do my big shopping on Weds.

Since the turkeys are fresh, I’m hoping to roast all of them today (I’ll start as soon as I finish posting this :)).  I’ll put one in in the freezer for Thanksgiving and can the other two.  Then I’ll use all the bones for a huge pot of broth, and can that, too.  I haven’t done much canning recently, and the empty jars are building up  as I’ve been using up my home canned foods and not replacing it!  (I’ve been using the meat I canned last winter for cholent every week.)  Turkeys are too bulky to keep them in the freezer, particularly before my big stocking up trip.  So this is a great way to take advantage of this once a year price on good quality poultry.

I love seeing how H-shem (G-d) is constantly working in my life!  Isn’t it wonderful how I was sent this super priced turkey just when I wanted to upgrade our diets in this specific way?  If you have a Trader Joes near you, check it out!

Avivah

Phytic acid information

nutrition

Contrary to what some people believe about stay at home mothers having their intellectual brain capacity diminished by being around their children all day, being a mother provides so many opportunities for learning about all kind of things!

There have been a number of questions here about why I soak grains, what it does for them, why it makes a difference, what is beneficial about sourdough, etc.   What about nuts?  Seeds?  Legumes?  These are all good questions, and without how and why preparing them properly makes a difference, it can seem like a lot of time and effort that can better be spent in other areas.

I’ve read about these issues off and on for several years in different sources, and therefore I feel the small amount of additional preparation time for these foods is very worthwhile, as it makes the nutrients significantly more available for utilization by the body.  But when I saw this free e-course on phytic acid research several days ago, I took the chance to sign up and learn something more!

This is a free course, and broken down into short and easy pieces, and it occurred to me that some of you will probably be interested in learning more about these questions in depth.  Here is the link for the course.

I already learned something new in the second day’s ‘lesson’, and I’m looking forward to learning lots more!

Avivah

How to make grape juice

food preservation, Intentional Spending, ,

At the end of last week I found a great deal on boxes of wine grapes.  There were two kinds, Concord and a yellow grape that another shopper told me were called Niagara.  I tasted one of the Niagara grapes, and as I did, the memory of being a kid eating grapes in my grandparents’ backyard suddenly flooded over me.  These were the grapes they grew, something that I had entirely forgotten about.  They were so good!

The grapes were super cheap because they were so ripe – the Concord grapes had some clusters that had mold on them and since I wasn’t interested in having to pick through them, I decided to get 2 boxes of Niagaras instead (they looked very ripe but in basically good shape).  The price was $7.50 for two boxes, and each box had about 18 pounds in it, so .21 lb.

They made for great eating and we enjoyed the grapes for our picnic right after our shopping, but we decided to reserve some of them to make some homemade grape juice, something we’ve never tried.  When I got home I learned from reading online that it takes about 20 lb of grapes to make 7 quarts of juice – if I’d had any idea of that when buying the grapes, I would have bought a lot more.  We used about a third of a box, about 6 lb. of grapes, which made enough to fill a 64 oz jar plus a couple of cups more, about ten cups in all.  So my estimate on cost is that it was $1.25 for ten cups; when I get it on sale, I pay $3 for 8 cups.  That means that making my own grape juice cost me less than 1/3 of the price I can get it on sale. 

Here’s how you make grape juice – this is soooo simple!  First you wash the grapes, then blend them slightly in a food processor or blender to break open the skin (yes, this means with the seeds and skins, but make sure all the stems are off, because it will make the juice bitter).  Put all of them in a pot with enough water to cover them, and cover the pot.  Then heat it until boiling.  When it reaches boiling, turn it down to medium low and let it simmer for about fifteen minutes.  Then line a strainer with cheesecloth or muslin, and set it on top of a cleanpot where the juice can drain in. Pour the grape mix through the strainer, and bottle the strained juice.  If you make a large amount, you can can fruit juice by water bathing it.

This didn’t look or taste like the grape juice in the store; it was much better!  It was so amazingly good!  Everyone loved it and we all are sorry we won’t have any more.  When I encountered the sale, I didn’t want to buy lots of grapes (not that 36 lb is a small amount) that needed to be dealt with immediately, since I didn’t know how much time would be involved and was concerned that it would be a big project that would compromise the commitment I’ve made to myself to be ready for Shabbos by Friday afternoon.   (I already had a lot of unpacking for Thursday afternoon to do from my monthly shopping which was putting me on a tight schedule.)  Now that I know what’s involved, I won’t hesitate to buy up a bunch more if an incredible sale comes my way again! 

Avivah

How to make yogurt

cheesemaking, food preservation, Intentional Spending, lacto fermentation, recipes,

Yesterday I made a large batch of yogurt, something I haven’t done in a while. I had forgotten how extremely easy it is to make, and it’s about a third of the price of the least expensive store yogurt!  I made a very large recipe of 1.5 gallons (24 cups), but the recipe below is for a more moderate amount.

Homemade Yogurt

  • 2 c. milk
  • 2 T. yogurt to use as bacterial starter (look for any plain yogurt at the store that says it has bacteria in it – eg. acidophilus- you can get the smallest cup size sold)

I used organic whole milk, but you can use any kind of milk you want.  Put the milk in a pot, and heat it until almost boiling, 180 degrees.  I have a candy thermometer for this, which eliminates the guesswork.  Once it reaches that heat, turn off the heat and let it cool down to between 105 and 110 degrees.

Stir in the yogurt.  Don’t let the temperature go below 105 degrees before you pour into a jar, then cover the jar with a lid.  Now put the jar somewhere warm where it can incubate overnight.  An oven set to 100 degrees is perfect, but you can also put the jar into a picnic cooler.  If you’re using a cooler, line it with a towel, put the jar in, and cover it with a towel.  Some people put a heating pad set on low on top of the towel, or a hot water bottle, to keep the temperature constant, but if you make several jars of yogurt, then the heat from the jars will keep all of them warm without anything extra.  It should be ready within eight to twelve hours.

I did a couple of things that made the process even easier.  First of all, I left the yogurt to incubate in the covered pot I heated it in.  Then I removed the trays from my dehydrator and put the entire pot inside (set at 100 degrees).  And that was all we had to do, except eat large quantities of it for breakfast. 🙂

You can add flavorings if you like. This morning I had mine with some fruit spread that I canned a while back, and it reminded me of a healthy version of the yogurt cups with fruit at the bottom when mixed together.

Avivah