Food hypotheticals, yoghurt troubleshooting, and yet another birthday party
Odds and ends to round out October
Would you rather? Food edition
Many years ago, a good friend and I started playing a game. We would ask each other hypothetical questions related to food, like if you could only eat five foods for the rest of your life, what would they be? Or what is your ideal meal? If you could pick one food to eat that had no health or caloric consequences, what would you choose?
We started playing this around the time I had my first baby, and I spent a lot of time in those days just walking, pushing her in the stroller because that was an easy way to parent and also the only way she would nap. It was a time before I discovered podcasts, so often I’d just be walking in silence or listening to music. This left a lot of brain space to ponder ridiculous, hypothetical questions about food.
For the record, seven years later, I still don’t know what five foods I would choose if I could only eat five for the rest of my life, and the reason this is coming up now is because I recently stumbled across a reddit thread that asked a similar kind of question: if you could only eat rice or potatoes for the rest of your life, what would you choose?
That was the question that broke me. Potatoes are one of my five foods (eggs are another; I’m still undecided on the final three), and I love them in pretty much all of their forms. But rice. It’s not so much that I love rice but more that I think it is a part of me. Rice is comfort, home, family, identity, childhood. I don’t love all forms of rice (the way that I love all forms of potato), and I mostly only eat and cook rice in one way (steamed, plain rice). In deliberating that particular ‘would you rather?’ I think that for me, potato is the sexy, exciting option (chips! roast potatoes! mashed potatoes!) but rice is coming home.
I guess that answers the question, actually. I’d choose rice.
Yoghurt troubleshooting
I’ve been making my own yoghurt since March, and it has mostly gone pretty well. There were two times recently that it failed completely (instead of having yoghurt in the slow cooker the following morning, I had warm milk), and one time where it kind of failed. The kind of failure happened just a couple of weeks ago — the milk/yoghurt tasted like yoghurt (it had the yoghurt tang and taste) but it had the consistency of milk. It was very, very liquidy. I strained it anyway to see if it would become more yoghurt-like in consistency, and it didn’t. I ate it anyway because it didn’t taste off or smell bad, and it still tasted mostly like yoghurt. Nothing bad happened (I’m still alive to tell you about my kind-of-failed yoghurt) but perhaps you shouldn’t try this at home.
I wanted to know why this was happening. The way that I made it was the same way as I had been making it all those times it worked, for months. The thing that turns milk into yoghurt is bacteria (and time and darkness), so I guessed that the first couple of times it failed, I didn’t have enough bacteria. I tried using more starter in the process, and tried other types of yoghurt starter, but the final time (the time of the kind-of failure) was an attempt using store-bought yoghurt I had successfully used in the past, with a full half cup as stated in the recipe, and it still didn’t completely work. Why?!
Luckily, shortly after that yoghurt-making attempt, I was having dinner at a friend’s parents’ house. My friend’s mum has been making yoghurt for longer than I’ve been alive. I told her about my yoghurt problems and asked her for advice.
The main issue with asking my friend’s mum for advice is that my friend’s mum has been making yoghurt forever using a metal bowl. She heats up the milk on the stove, and after it has reached the right temperature and the starter has been stirred in, she leaves it in the (off) oven overnight to transform into yoghurt. She doesn’t use a thermometer to check the temperature of the milk, she just knows.
I, however, do not have decades of yoghurt-making experience under my belt. My method of yoghurt-making was to use a slow cooker. Pour the milk in, turn it to high, wait for it to reach 180 degrees Fahrenheit, turn it off and wait for it to cool down to 110–115 degrees Fahrenheit, stir in room-temperature starter, cover with a couple of towels so it’s dark, and leave for twelve hours. The first few times I did this I used a thermometer to check the milk’s temperature, and noted how long it took for the milk to reach 180, and then how long it took for it to get back down to 115. I then used that timing for all subsequent batches of yoghurt.
You can see where I’m going with this, right? The advice from my friend’s mum was to check the temperature. She said that when she makes yoghurt, the timing of everything can change if it’s a particularly hot day or a cold day. She had never used a slow cooker to make yoghurt, or a thermometer to check the temperature. She couldn’t advise me on my specific method of making yoghurt, but she reminded me of the fundamental principles of making yoghurt, gadgets aside. Check the temperature.
So on my most recent attempt, since I came home from that dinner and conversation, I checked the temperature and didn’t just rely on the old timing. It turns out that’s where I’d been going wrong. On the failed attempts, I’d been giving the milk three hours to come down to 110–115 degrees. It worked for the first four or five months! Three hours never failed me! Until it did. When I checked the temperature after three hours, it was still at about 130/140 degrees Fahrenheit. So I waited, and kept checking. This time, it took about three hours and 45 minutes for the milk to cool down to the right temperature. I stirred in the starter and the next morning, I had yoghurt.
I guess I’ll just keep checking the temperature from now on. Though I am curious: why did my slow cooker change temperature? Or was it not the slow cooker?
Birthday time again
My daughter turned seven last week. One of her celebrations was a small party at our house. When she was a baby, I read a lot of parenting books (mostly because I was writing about them for Book Riot; the fact that I learnt a few things was a nice side effect), and one of them was about parenting in the Netherlands compared to parenting in the US, The Happiest Kids in the World. Dutch parents have a much more relaxed approach towards parenting, and one of the examples given were birthday parties. Instead of having very large birthday parties, with elaborate themes and decorations, hired entertainment, and fancy lolly bags, Dutch birthday parties were basically play dates with a slice of cake.
That was the kind of birthday party I wanted to have for my children. This was maybe because of the benefits of this style of parenting discussed in the book (would I also end up with the happiest kids in the world?) but honestly, it mostly appealed to my sense of laziness and hating waste. Play date with cake, where I don’t have to buy and throw out all manner of disposable things, or hire entertainment? Sweet, let’s do that.
This is the third time I’ve done the play-date-with-cake style party at our house, and it went well. We invited just a handful of kids, they played, and we did Pass the Parcel (classic birthday party game). We had vegetables, hummus, and quesadillas for food, and we had another Ukrainian honey cake that we’ve been buying for a couple of years now. Low-key party and we successfully marked another passing year.