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I joined the ranks of People Who Have Made Soy Milk At Home.

My first attempt yielded a pretty weak product, though it tasted good hot and both Sami and I enjoyed it. Combining info from five or six different sources on home soy milk making (without a machine), here is what I did:

1) Soaked one cup of dry beans overnight in about a quart of water.  I replaced the water about once every 8 hours for 24 hours.  I think this is longer than necessary, but it didn’t seem to do any harm.

2) Boiled the beans for about 30 minutes.

3)  Ground up beans in the food processor with about one cup of (hot!) water for each 1/3 cup of beans.

4)  Strained the milk through cheesecloth to remove the okara (bean pulp.)  Squeezed the okara until it was more or less bone dry.

5) Added a tablespoon of honey and a pinch of salt to the quart or so of hot hot milk.

6) The end.  Enjoyed a cup of hot, fresh soy milk.  It was very weak (about 50% regular soy milk strength) but still tasty.  Even Sami liked it.

The second attempt was much, much better.  This time, I:

1) Soaked 2 cups of dry beans in 2 quarts of water overnight.

2) Microwaved the beans until they were heated through - about 3 minutes.  I read on the internet somewhere that heating the beans before grinding them in hot water can reduce the beany soy milk flavor.

3) Ground up the beans, this time in the BLENDER (not the Cuisinart) for a finer grist.  One cup of beans to about 3.5 cups of barely boiling water.  I did this in four shifts before I got tired, and still have about a third of the beans.

4) Strain the blended stuff through clean cotton cloth.  I skipped the cheesecloth and went straight to a 12 x 12 inch swatch of muslin.  Since the grist was very fine and the cheesecloth I have is a loose weave, I figured this way I’d get better straining.  I think I was right.  Strain it until I’m satisfied that all the gooky parts are out.  I did this twice.

5)  Cook the milk.  Low boil for 30 minutes.  I scooped off all the little bits of foam that formed on top.

6) Serve hot with honey and salt as before - yum.  Then pour the rest (about a gallon?) into a storage container - in my case a giant tupperware container with a pour-spout lid.  I plan to get a glass pitcher with a sealing lid.

It wasn’t as hard as you’d think it would be, especially without a soy milk machine.  I probably wouldn’t make this big a batch again, so in the future I won’t have to do the grind/strain dance so many times in a row.  THe most time consuming elements were the soaking of the beans and the 30 minute milk cooking time.  I can take save soaking time by putting them in the fridge a day or two before I want to make more, or always keeping a batch in there if I think I’ll make soy milk once a week or so.  Not much to be done about the cook time, except perhaps to time it so that hot fresh milk is available when I want it.

I highly recommend doing this.  It was (dare I say) fun!  And I don’t think I’ll need to buy soy milk again.  For the price of one carton of soy milk (or so) I got about a pound of beans, which I can use to make a whole case or more of soy milk.  I don’t have to take home all those plastc-lined cartons!  I don’t have to drink additives or preservatives or sugar!  Unless I want flavor or sugar!  Wheeeee!

I hate styrofoam.

It melts down and becomes a toxic mess in the microwave. On occasions when it comes in contact with your hot food (think take-out Chinese) it leaves an unappealing odor, poison-like flavor and plasticky texture on your meal. It doesn’t recycle. It takes up too much room in the trash.

I’ve been cooking at home a lot more lately, and so naturally I haven’t been seeing as much styrofoam in my life. However, almost any time I do go out, I’ll take leftovers, and most leftovers wind up traveling in those flat white styrofoam vessels of doom.

Well, I’ve had it with styrofoam almost as badly as I’ve had it with the ubiquitous plastic that finds its way into almost everything. I’ve decided my future move will be to keep reusable food containers in my car. I already keep a handful of canvas grocery bags in there for whatever impromptu shopping may crop up. What’s another cubic half-foot of space if it means keeping styrofoam out of my house?

I can’t keep styrofoam out of my printer, computer, tv, or other appliance boxes (though I can use my existing appliances until they no longer serve me, and I can try to find deals on used ones instead of buying new). I can hope that packages I get in the mail will be packed with the corn starch peanuts instead of real styrofoam. And there’s nothing I can do about the styrofoam containers from the occasional lunch ordered out (though again, I can try to avoid doing this as a general rule.)

But keeping containers in my car is a simple, EASY way to avoid the evil white stuff. Why wouldn’t I?

Nope, it’s not that some people are just insensitive, self-centered  or mean.  If you have difficulty relating to other people’s problems, you might have empathy deficit disorder.

Sure, we all could strive to be more attentive to others’ feelings.  Some more than others.  I just can’t get my brain around the idea of slapping on a “disorder” title for what I otherwise would call “personality.”

On NPR today I heard a story on the tomato-salmonella problem, which seems to be overblown, considering regions at risk have been identified and many regions have already been cleared by the FDA.

What caught my attention was when an FDA food safety wonk was talking about how hard it is to track the problem.  A market may have up to 4 distributors bringing in tomatoes, who each may get tomatoes from 4 suppliers, who probably get tomatoes from 4 or more farms themselves… the supply chain is convoluted and WIDE.  How in the world can such a problem ever be solved?

I know!  Buy local produce!  I know it’s not a perfect solution, but encouraging more people to know the farmers who grow the tomatoes they eat would be a start.  I don’t worry about salmonella because I can call up the farm my share comes from and find out if they’ve been tested and what the results were.  I find that reassuring.

On the “never ending diaper ado,” I just had to include this link because the columnist’s response sums up my views on diapers.  I’ve always thought that if you compare the resources required to launder diapers (soap, water consumption, gas for drying, etc) to the impact of disposable diapers (manufacture, landfill disposal, etc) you end up with a wash.  The study mentioned invested exhaustive research to back up previous research on the same topic.

Yup, the brits determined that cloth at home, cloth with diaper service, and disposable diapers are roughly equal in environmental impact.  So, bully for anyone who is seeking out environmentally friendly laundry detergent, seeking out sustainable cotton for nappies, buying local to reduce the energy consumption of transport, drying in the sun, using disposables that are made from recycled materials or free of petroleum, or using compostable diapers.  Making choices like those actually DO make one individual’s choice stand above the otherwise equal choices.

Ben and I were watching Daily Show just now and lamenting the “This Week in God” segment.  Lo and behold, Colbert did “Obama’s Church Search” which was not a surrogate, but certainly a salute to the old digs.  Sigh.  I miss “This Week in God.”  The Daily Show hasn’t been quite the same since Colbert left.

And that’s about all I can squeeze up at the moment.

Salad Pirate Photo.

Originally uploaded by cinediva

I found a freeloader after I washed and prepared my salad for lunch today!

I would have thought finding a stowaway slug in my salad would disturb and/or disgust me, but because I actually like my food certifiably organic, I found it deceptively comforting.

Sure, I cross my fingers and hope that I didn’t just eat some of his friends. Even if I did, I clearly didn’t notice. The salad was fresh and wonderful!

Best of all, there were no toxic chemicals to kill my little friend. Life is grand.

No pictures, this time. But yesterday I was bestowed a gift of pears, apples and oranges from a friend nearly done with pastry school, and the pears were especially close to their expiration date.

Last night I took advantage of this incredible yet precarious gift by breaking in the ice cream maker I recently acquired on Craigslist for $17. (I’d been about ready to buy one at full price, too!)

It turns out that bruised pears are not so unappealing once they have been pureed. The sorbet recipe was quite simple after the pureeing action - add lemon juice, simple syrup, mix well, then add to the ice cream maker and operate as the manufacturer intended.

I was truly surprised that a bowl with a liquid interior, frozen solid, could so thoroughly turn my puree into more-solid-than-liquid slush. After a half hour in the ice cream machine, the sorbet still required a time in the freezer to get to the solid state I prefer.

But… I made sorbet! No carton to throw in the landfill! It lives in an airtight reusable plastic storage jar in our freezer. And it was so easy, I would easily do it again.

Perhaps next time I’ll start in the afternoon so that it will be slushified and totally frozen by the time we’re done with dinner.

I’m a little late to this party, but I think the new farmers’ market in City Heights is important and I hope that San Diegans will go out to support it.

It’s a block south of University, on Wightman between 43rd and Fairmount. This can’t be too far from Red Sea (Ethiopian Restaurant). It’s a brand new, itty bity farmers’ market with only 11 vendors to start with, but I feel hopeful that if people show enough demand, more vendors will come!

For those of us not living in SD, City Heights is a low-income neighborhood. Residents there do not have much if any access to fresh food (let alone local or organic.) Just having a farmers’ market will be a huge opportunity for City Heights residents to get real food.

The remarkable thing is that this farmers’ market is going to accept food stamps and WIC coupons. This means that people formerly buying food at convenience stores because of the dearth of decent markets can now get the kinds of foods everyone should be eating. (That fresh foods are as much a luxury as they are is criminal; everyone should be able to eat food that resembles food, not packaged crap.) On top of that, food stamp and WIC customers of the market in City Heights will have their purchases matched dollar for dollar up to $10, so their stamps and coupons will go much farther than at a supermarket or convenience store.

I am so excited by this, so excited for City Heights residents. Please, please, if you can go support the baby farmers’ market! I wish I’d been able to on Saturday, but I plan to go this weekend.

Here’s the link to the SignOnSanDiego article:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20080604/news_1m4farm.html

So the temperature in the slow cooker last night ran a little high. I turned off the heat and covered the whole thing in a few towels and sweatshirts.

What I found this morning was yogurt… -ish. It was much thinner than what I got yesterday, and when I stirred together the thicker part and the thinner part, it was still kind of lumpy and curdy. Hmm. However, it smelled and tasted OK.

Next time I’ll try adding some powdered milk for thickness. Next time I think I will also actually use the yogurt making machine so that the temperature will be consistently controlled at the optimal temp.

I took one cup of this yogurt, added a tablespoon of coffee from yesterday, a teaspoon of honey, and a drop of vanilla extract, and I have to say it was quite tasty. So the silver lining was super thin but extra yummy, homemade yogurt with no gelatin, preservatives, etc. In a glass jar.

Net positive, I think.

After having had my head buried in the sand for some time, I recently learned that yogurt cups are not recyclable in San Diego. Boo.

With a hungry toddler in the house, it goes pretty much without saying that we consume a lot of yogurt. We eat it at home and frequently send the individual cups in her lunchbox to school. I’d estimate that in an average week our household consumes 10 to 12 cups of yogurt.

That’s a lot of plastic waste that can’t be recycled, and as you may have noticed, reducing waste has become very important to me. I did some research and discovered that it is actually not all that hard to make yogurt at home, which means that I could send it with Sami in one of her old wide-mouth bottles with a sealing lid rather than the drinking nipple; this would produce far less junk needing disposal.

This is my yogurt maker - I primarily like it for the reusable glass jars: http://www.healthgoods.com/shopping/appliances/Euro_Cuisine_YM80_Yogurt_Maker.asp

In fact, I didn’t actually even use the machine today, just the jars. I made a few small jars and a few big mason jars of yogurt, and the mason jar doesn’t fit in the yogurt machine, so I used the slow cooker.

General instructions on making yogurt:
http://biology.clc.uc.edu/Fankhauser/cheese/yogurt_making/yogurt2000.htm

Instructions I followed this time:
http://www.fakeplasticfish.com/2007/12/plastic-free-yogurt-well-almost-plus.html

I didn’t use a Thermos - as I mentioned, I used the slow cooker to maintain the temperature. It actually was kind of a pain, I had to monitor it and turn it on and off to keep it from getting too warm and too cold. Finally I set it to Warm and put the lid on off-kilter to release some of the heat, and this seemed to help the temperature stay both moderate (around 110 degrees F) and consistent.

8 hours later, after a trip to the zoo, sushi dinner and a bath for Sami, I came back to find solid-ish yogurt almost completely surrounded by a yellowish, watery liquid, which I’ve learned is called whey. I wanted thicker yogurt, so I decided to be smart and strain my yogurt through cheesecloth (saving the whey for my next creative feat, to be announced).

What I wound up with was halfway between the texture of a very firm yogurt and ricotta cheese, though still with a distinctly yogurty flavor. As it turns out, I think what I was supposed to do was maybe siphon off some of the whey, but definitely stir the creamier part back up with all or most of the whey.

Oops. Well, shoot. My first shot at home made yogurt, and I went and F-ed it up trying to be smart. That was disappointing. But I consulted with Captain Google, anyway, to try to find out what it was that I had actually made.

I ended up finding a name for what I made, when I idly started flipping through How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, looking for anything related to making yogurt. There is an innocuous recipe tucked away in there, just called “Yogurt.” In a subsection of the recipe were instructions on making “yogurt cheese.” Back to Google!

http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/yogurtcheese.htm

So at least there’s a name for what I ended up making. Only, true yogurt cheese is strained far longer than just a few minutes. Still, it’s thick enough I think I could pull off some uses of yogurt cheese, including spreading it on my bagel, or serving it to Sami as if it were yogurt anyway.

And then I moved on to another batch of yogurt, prepared the same way except that in the morning when I go to fetch it, I will not strain it. I’ll just stir it within an inch of its life and hope for the best.

Here endeth the adventure, for today. Reports are forthcoming on how the yogurt cheese worked out, and what home made yogurt tastes like. (It seems to smell just like commercial yogurt.)

Well, I’m officially impressed with gDiapers. I got my starter kit yesterday, which came with two pairs of g pants (cotton covers), four snap-in liners, and a packet of inserts.

Since 5 PM yesterday when I put the first one on her, we’ve had a wide variety of the types of diapers Sami typically experiences. I won’t go into too much detail, to spare the folks who don’t wipe someone else’s butt many times a day. But - no leaks! Period. When we were in cloth diapers, I could count on at least a leak, probably two in a 24-hour period, and disposables haven’t been all that much better. I think the liner + cover design really works for gDiapers.

I’m excited about how little has gone in my trash can. I’m more excited about how much has been able to go in my compost bin!

Obviously, this is my 24-hour review, and we’ll see how I feel in a week. I’m optimistic.

In my quest to reduce/reuse/recycle and because I ran out of razor blades and left my razor handle in New York, I decided to give sugaring a try.

Sugaring is basically waxing, using a thick sugar solution instead of, well, wax. And I used an old stained pillowcase cut into strips. You basically mix up some honey, sugar and a few other ingredients, spread it on, cover with a cloth strip, and then yank the strip and sugar off against the hair growth.

Sound painful? That’s because it was! It… really F-ing hurt, actually. I think it might have hurt more because I had to do my own yanking. I also missed little areas here and there, and I presume it will take me a few applications to get this right.

However, I know from experience with getting my eyebrows waxed that this method of hair removal lasts way longer than shaving (which lasts a day or two), and think of all the plastic razors/blades/plastic packaging I won’t have to buy anymore! Less waste, less shaving AND less hair on my legs = awesome. Yeah, I’ve become quite the crazy hippie in my old age.

Anyway, I’d recommend this to anyone with a decent tolerance for pain.

EDIT:

For anyone in San Diego looking for recommended waxing services, here are links to the places my commenters have recommended.

<a href=”http://www.braziliaskincare.com/index.html” target=”_blank”>Brazilia La Jolla</a>

<a href=”http://www.urbanskincare.com/” target=”_blank”>Urban Skin Care</a>