Thursday, April 29, 2010

Catching up

Oh! It's been awhile since I was here. Well in the time that I've been gone I finally got around to making the Oatmeal pancakes (with mixed results) and homemade yogurt (surprisingly easy).
Let's start with the Yogurt.

I found a recipe for homemade yogurt on Recipezaar (where else, that's where I get almost all of my recipes). Basically what you do is 1. Boil milk.

2. Let it cool to about 120 degrees (where you can just stick your finger in it, but why do this as whatever germs are on your finger will end up in the milk)
3. (you can pour it into another container at this point) Add about 1-2 tablespoons of yogurt (with live active cultures) or yogurt starter for each cup of milk that you boiled. 4. Stir well 5. Let sit in a warm place (keeping milk at about 110 -115 degrees) for 4-8 hours depending on how firm you want your yogurt. In order to keep it warm first I tried putting it in a crock-pot full of water on the warm setting, but it got to warm, so I had to keep turning it on and off.
This time I'm trying the wrap into towels method, where you wrap the jar full of yogurt in a bunch of towels to keep in the heat (after about four hours it seemed to be getting cold so I put it the whole thing in an oven that I warmed to 170 then turned off) we'll see how this works.
With any luck your yogurt will set up right and you'll have nice thick yogurt.
As for the Leftover Oatmeal pancakes....
Well, I didn't have a specific recipe and for all of my looking online the best I got was add a cup of leftover oatmeal to the pancake batter and increase the baking powder to make up for the heaviness of the batter. Not very specific is it? So I decided to start with half a cup of oatmeal and increased the baking soda by another tablespoon.

The batter was thicker than normal, and VERY lumpy (but I expected that I did use whole oat groats to make my oatmeal after all) but I couldn't use my trusty recycled ketchup bottle to squeeze my pancake batter into the pan.
(trusty leftover ketchup bottle, you know Williams Sonoma sells something similar for $10, but this way you can reduce and reuse).

The pancakes were not bad.
They were slightly chewier than normal, much puffier than normal, and I was slightly concerned about them being cooked all the way through but they tasted ok. I think I'm going to need to play around with it a little more, I think it would be awesome with buttermilk, but Taiwan is not the place for buttermilk.

Next up: Homemade Ice Cream