Experiments with Yogurt Making

A few months ago I bought Home Dairy with Ashley English, and have been trying to make the perfect batch of yogurt. The process is easy enough: heating milk, letting it cool and adding live yogurt culture, then keeping at a medium heat for a few hours.

My first batch was much too thin, and the second wasn't much better. I added milk powder to thicken the next batch and things were looking good. I was using the slow cooker as the incubator, and every now and then turning the heat on to make sure the temperature didn't get too low. I left for about half an hour to take the dog for a walk, and when I returned I realised instead of turning the slow cooker off, I'd turned it to high! Yogurt does not like high temperature, and curdling ensued.

Last weekend I decided to have another go and was finally successful! I've been having it unsweetened with muesli and fruit most mornings this week, but I made sure to save a couple of spoonfuls as a starter for the next batch. My next experiment will be adding some flavour, any suggestions?

Snow Day!

It usually snows in Christchurch about once a year, and this morning we woke up to this:

Snow is so infrequent here that nobody's really equipped to deal with it, so the city shuts down for the day. I love a bonus long weekend! This is the heaviest snowfall I've ever seen in Christchurch, and the best thing about snow here is that it's usually gone within a day or two, just when the novelty has worn off.

Our plans for the rest of the day involve keeping the fire going, building a snowman (we pretty much have to do that), and taking the dog for a walk. It turns out she really loves snow!

Bedroom Renovations

When we moved in to our house last September Owen and I decided that our first project was going to be repainting the largest bedroom. The walls had been painted yellow and blue:

And I was so impatient to change them we started stripping the wallpaper within ten minutes of getting the keys to the house (hence the bare wall by the window!). We were planning to patch up any damage to the wall and repaint, hoping that the room would be ready to move in to after a few weeks. But then this happened:

Since the walls weren't in the best condition we thought it would be a good opportunity to replace the plasterboard and add some insulation. But once the walls were taken down some new problems emerged: uneven rafters and a sagging ceiling. Once we realised what a big and expensive project we had undertaken things stalled, and the room stayed like this for months.

Recently Owen decided to finally finish the room, so within the last few weeks he's evened out the rafters, rounded up some friends to help replace the ceiling, and last weekend we installed the insulation.

With all the progress we were on a bit of a roll, and managed to get the new plasterboard up as well. The next job is plastering all the joins, and then we'll finally be ready to paint!

The only thing holding us back now is earthquake related. Our house didn't suffer any major damage but it's settled a bit, which means the whole place will probably need to be lifted so the foundations can be fixed. When the house is lifted the existing cracks will most likely be made worse and new ones might be created, so finishing the bedroom now may mean patching and repainting again in a few of months.

Out latest plan is to finish the plastering, see if either of our parents have paint leftover from their recent renovations, and do a couple of coats of whatever paint we end up with. Once the foundations have been fixed and the house is sorted we'll buy some paint and redo it properly. This means that hopefully we'll be able to move in to the bedroom in a few weeks, even if we have to wait a little longer to finish it completely. I can't wait!