Month: November 2011

Homemade Yogurt and Granola Parfaits

/ Shane / 5 Comments

The Reason:

When you tell people you’re making yogurt, you sound like some sort of super-hippie. But why not make your own yogurt? It’s *super* easy (as you will see below), and it’s cheaper than buying it (its about 1/2 to 1/3rd the price of buying yogurt). It’s healthy. It encourages you to eat more yogurt, which is a healthy habit. And if you’re making yogurt, you might as well make some homemade granola to go with it.

The Journey:

The craziest thing about making yogurt is how simple it is. It’s mostly just milk!

You can even save some of the yogurt from the previous batch as the culture to start the next batch, though I’ve heard that eventually the strain won’t be strong enough to continue without mixing in some fresh stuff from the store. I can’t verify that.

I will admit that making the yogurt takes a long time, but it’s not really active time. It’s not like you have to do anything during that time. It’s mostly just a matter of keeping it warm.

The granola could have been a post in its own right. Of course it gives a nice crunch to your parfait, but you can use it for anything you might use granola for. Sara eats bowls of it with milk for breakfast.

The Verdict:

It’s great. The kids love it. The thing about yogurt is that it is so versatile. You can mix in honey, vanilla, or jam. You can have it with blueberries, strawberries, or mango. You can use it to substitute for oil in baking. You can decide how much to sweeten it, and after doing this for awhile, you won’t be able to go back to the super-sweet, store-bought variety. What’s not to love?

And that’s to say nothing of the granola, which has a million uses itself, even above and beyond yogurt parfaits. Make it with almonds, make it with dried fruit. Throw whatever you want in there. Yum!

Plus, you sound impressive when you say you make your own yogurt. Nobody has to know how easy it is. That’s between you, me, and the public Internet.

The Recipe:

Yogurt

This recipe is from Stephanie O’Dae’s A Year of Slow Cooking.

  • 8 cups of milk (half-gallon). We generally try for organic whole milk, but I think you could use anything (we have made it with 2% and couldn’t tell the difference).
  • 1/2 cup of plain yogurt (live/active culture).
  • That’s it. Seriously. Just milk and a little yogurt!
  1. Add the milk to the crock pot. Cook on low for 2 1/2 hours.
  2. Turn off the crock pot. Let it sit for 3 hours.
  3. Scoop out 2 cups of the warm(ish) milk from the crock pot, and mix that with the 1/2 cup of “starter” yogurt. Then put the whole thing back into the crock pot and stir.
  4. Cover the crock pot with towels and leave it overnight (at least 8 hours)

Maybe it’s because of the towels, which sort of force you to unwrap the thing like a present on Christmas morning, but it’s always something of a surprise / delight when you  get up to find yogurt in the crock pot! For some reason, it always seems like it’s not going to work. Maybe because it’s so easy…a little TOO easy!

Granola

This recipe is from Mark Bittman, although any recipe for granola is really more of a suggestion than a recipe. So I’ll give you his recipe, but I’d say we make it a little different every time (as intended!).

  • 6 cups rolled oats (not quick-cooking or instant)
  • 2 cups mixed nuts (you can probably use anything, but we usually use chopped walnuts or almonds)
  • 1 cup shredded coconut (optional)
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla
  • 1 /2 to 1 cup honey or maple syrup (we usually do 1/2 cup that is a mix of honey and maple syrup)
  • 1 cup chopped dried fruit (such as raisins or dried cranberries)

We usually don’t actually put in the dried fruit, since we are usually using this in yogurt parfaits. You can always throw dried fruit in when you’re going to eat it, if needed. Also, we find that the coconut really adds something. We’ve tried it with and without, but after not having it and then putting it back in, I don’t think we’ll go back to leaving it out!

  1. Heat the oven to 350°F. Combine everything except the dried fruit. Spread evenly on a rimmed baking sheet and bake for 30 minutes or a little longer, stirring occasionally. The mixture should brown evenly; the browner it gets without burning, the crunchier the granola will be.
  2. Remove the pan from the oven and add the dried fruit (if you want to add dried fruit). Cool on a rack, stirring once in a while until the granola reaches room temperature. Transfer to a sealed container and store in the refrigerator; it will keep indefinitely.

We have also made the Spiced Granola from that page, which is the same as above, with the following additions:

  • Another teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground anise (we usually leave this out, mostly because we don’t have any anise)
  • 1/2 teaspoon cardamom
  • 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

My god…it’s brilliant…almost TOO brilliant

/ Shane / 2 Comments

You are probably aware of Google’s efforts to digitize as many books as possible, scanning (literally) tons of print books into their computers. Sometimes there are technical glitches or errors when scanning these books in: print may be smudged or damaged, especially if it is very old. So Google came up with a brilliant yet simple solution to this problem: get people to unwittingly do it for them, for free.

You see, even now, there are some things that are very easy for a person to do, but very difficult for a computer to do. Recognizing distorted text turns out to be one of these things. Google doesn’t want to pay an army of people to read through these books and transcribe them. That would take forever, to say nothing of the cost (although I’m pretty sure Google is more concerned with the time, than the cost). So how do you trick people into doing this for you?

reCaptcha.

You might not know the term, but a “captcha” is one of those things you have to fill out on the Internet to prove you’re not a spambot. You know, look at the image and write the text that you see, something like:

Well, if you’re using Google’s free reCaptcha product on your site (and who wouldn’t? If it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for me!), it not only verifies you’re not a robot, but also helps decode a particularly tricky word.

Take the example in the picture above. The first part (Years) decides if you’re a robot or not. The second part (maybe subioik?) is a picture of a word from a paper book which was scanned in, but not understood by the Google computers. If enough people answer the same thing on that captcha, the Google hive mind can assume that that image correctly maps to subioik.

In other words, it might take a computer a million years to run algorithms to figure that out, but Google could accomplish the same in about 30 seconds by harnessing millions of people trying to enter porn sites.

This is such a simple, obvious solution to the “smudged word” problem. It’s so smart it’s almost scary, like encountering an alien intelligence that is so far beyond my capacity. In fact, when I first heard about this, I dismissed it as some kind of crazy conspiracy theory. Not so. Information is available directly from Google.

I don’t see anything wrong with them doing this per say, but it still leaves a funny feeling in my stomach. I feel manipulated somehow. And anybody that ingenious is a little scary. So far they seem to be using their power for good, but what if that changed? I don’t know man…for some reason, this disturbs me greatly.

Link via Sylvain

The Dangers of Losing Weight, or, How I Lost My Wedding Ring

/ Shane / 8 Comments

So, as you are probably already aware if you had any contact with me in the past week (virtual or otherwise) that I lost my wedding ring.

The funny thing about your wedding ring, is that you never really notice it. And yet, you always *constantly* notice it. I wasn’t really aware of this until I lost my ring, but I unconsciously touch it or rub it a million times a day, like a touch-stone. Now that it’s gone, when I unconsciously touch my finger I have a millisecond of panic, where my mind just registers, “Something is wrong!” before I have time to think, “Oh yeah, my ring is gone.”

So it is hard to say where exactly I lost my ring. I know for sure that I had it the night before. Normally I probably wouldn’t have known that, but I was working in the garden pulling out tomato plants, and my ring flew off. I noticed right away, and I picked it up and thought, “Huh, that’s weird.” The next time I noticed my ring (or should I said didn’t notice my ring) was at work the next day.

Of course, since the last time I had it, I was in the garden, at home, at daycare, at school, and at work (and of course I’ve checked all of those places as thoroughly as I possibly can). It seems to me that it was most likely lost at work, since that is where I noticed I was missing it. Even though I don’t generally notice my ring, I have a feeling that I would have noticed it pretty quickly after I lost it. However, I wanted no stone left unturned, up to and including jumping in the dumpster at home and re-opening a poopy diaper I had changed. Those would have been totally worth it if I had found the ring, but I didn’t, so they really sucked.

As for how I lost it, I’m not really sure. You take your ring off for one second, and some hobbit is trying to throw it into Mount Doom. Just kidding, I never, ever take my ring off. (But I still don’t trust hobbits. Tricksy they are, tricksy.) It has always been a tiny bit on the big side, but if it has ever fallen off before, I noticed it immediately. I have been losing some weight for a while now, so maybe that’s why it slipped off, or maybe it was that in conjunction with the colder weather. As my co-worker pointed out: “You’re supposed to get fatter the longer you’re married. Your wife shouldn’t be feeding you healthy food.” In other words, this is all. Sara’s. Fault.

I’ve been pretty bummed about the whole thing. First off, taking the sentimentality out of it, it’s definitely the most expensive thing I’ve ever misplaced. Second off, I really hate losing anything. It just drives me crazy until I find it. I’ve been walking around staring at the ground everywhere I go, even if the ring couldn’t possibly be there (like if I go somewhere I didn’t go that day). I just can’t stop thinking about it, and thinking of more places to check, even if the places get more and more absurd.

But finally, you can’t take the sentimentality out of it. That’s my wedding ring! That’s the symbol of my marriage. I could get another ring, but it will never be THE ring. It’s not just any old ring. This has come up before, in the discussion of “upgrading” your ring. Some people get a new, better ring on some particular anniversary, such as adding diamonds, etc. The theory, I guess, is that you’re older and you have more money, so you can get a better ring now that you could have back when you got engaged. (Either that, or maybe it’s like, “Well, I guess it’s going to last after all, so I guess you ARE worth spending money on. Either way.) I have always adamantly been against this. I don’t care what kind of ring I would have bought now…it’s the one that I did buy that’s special. That’s the one that reminds me of where we were at at that point in our lives, even if we were young (perhaps BECAUSE we were young).

I don’t know, I’m just depressed about losing it. Now that it has been a week, I’m not holding out much hope of finding it.

My precioussssssss.

We’re off to see the turkey

/ Shane / Leave a comment

This year for Halloween, the entire family went as Wizard of Oz characters (making good use of that birthday present). Evie and Oliver were Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, respectively:

Sara was the Scarecrow:

And I was the Tin Woodsman (by process of elimination):

Okay, so my costume was a little uninspired.

Oliver was as excited as we’ve ever seen him, running around the house like a crazy man. But I’m not sure why, since he had no idea what Halloween or Trick or Treating was. We had practiced a little bit with him, but he only really liked the part where he said, “Knock knock!”. I guess maybe he just caught the mood from his big sister.

Oliver caught on pretty quickly, wandering from house to house and yelling, “More candy! More candy!” But then again, he didn’t actually *eat* any candy; he preferred to sit in the stroller and eat cheese and apples. We tried to skip some of the houses with him, but he was not having it. If Evie went to a house, he had to go to the house too.

Unlike Evie when she was little, Oliver was not afraid of anything. People in scary costumes, skeletons hanging from trees, moving blow-up cats, spiders dropping on people, nothing. He wasn’t even afraid of the giant turkey.

Yes, I said giant turkey.

You see, the street we go to for trick-or-treating is a little crazy around Halloween time. They usually have some sort of giant, scary structure in the middle of the road, and this year happened to be a giant turkey. This thing flaps it’s wings, moves its feet and mouth, and has some sort of speaker system that plays music and occasionally squawks. When I say giant, I mean giant: there is maybe a haunted house inside or something? We’re talking like 20 feet tall. Oliver thought it was fascinating.

There was one incident that I really regretted. There was a person kneeling by the sidewalk, unmoving, acting like a decoration and waiting to jump out and scare someone. I wasn’t 100% sure it was really a person, but I suspected, so I told Evie to go over and look under the hood. Well, Evie did NOT suspect it was a real person, and it didn’t occur to me to tell her, so you can imagine her surprise. Luckily they knew better than to really jump at her, but all they did was move their hand when Evie got close, and Evie lost her mind. She was so terrified that she couldn’t even run or scream, just sort of convulse in place like she had twenty thousand volts running through her. I grabbed her up immediately, but the damage had been done. She was absolutely terrified, and it took awhile for her to calm down. Why did I ask her to look under the hood? How could I not have foreseen that outcome?? Poor girl. The incident was quickly forgotten in all the excitement and didn’t ruin the night, but I felt pretty bad.

Everyone loved us being dressed up as a set. As we were walking around, so many people would say, “Oh look, there’d Dorothy. Oh, and the Lion. Oh, and here’s the Scarecrow! And the Tin Woodsman!” And yet, a surprising number of people got it wrong (“Is she the little girl from Little House on the Prairie?”). I kind of liked having a family theme though, so maybe we’ll have to remember that for future years.

Evie did not wear her Dorothy outfit to school. She went as a doctor: not a surgeon, but a “a doctor in the emergency room”. We were told that “characters” were not allowed at school, so we decided to play it safe and keep Dorothy out of it. But then, of course, there were two other Dorothy’s at school!

Evie: “I thought you couldn’t be a character?”
Teacher: “Well…we don’t want characters from t.v., but there’s a book for the Wizard of Oz, so that’s okay.”

Thanks a lot, mommy and daddy.

As we walked through our neighborhood on the way home, there were a few houses with their porch lights on. This is very unusual for our neighborhood. We have never seen anybody trick-or-treat (ever!) around there. So we decided to hit up those houses on the way home, to encourage the trend to continue.

At the first house, the porch light was on, but nobody was home. At the second house, someone came to the door, but it was clear that they didn’t expect anybody, and just happened to have some suckers since they had a little kid. The third house was for sale, but they had their porch light on and the gate was open, so it looked pretty inviting. Well, the only person that was there was someone working on the house, so he came to the door in his grubby clothes covered in paint and drywall dust. He insisted on busting out his wallet and giving a dollar to each of the kids, despite our objections.

Evie: “Why did that man give us a dollar, even though you both were saying, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no”?”

After that, we decided not to bother with any more houses on the street. But it wasn’t a total waste, since Evie later said that her favorite part of the evening was, “when I got the dollar.”