Tuesday, April 7, 2020

How to Make Yogurt

Hello!

I'm going to take leave of my usual form and do a quick photo blog of how to make yogurt. Several friends asked because I make yogurt regularly now that we've been under quarantine/Shelter in Place for 3 weeks. Cottage Sara is back in business! Tho, not as Queen of Strawbs, that's still on indefinite hiatus.


If you're new to my blog, feel free to poke around. I haven't had many spoons to update in like...2 years? Partially because, well, life. Partially because I'm writing a book about how to be friends when you're an adult. If you want to hear more about that, please comment and I'll get in touch.

HOW TO MAKE YOGURT: a lot of it.

A tale in several parts

Start with some store bought yogurt, like Mountain High or Verka. Mountain High doesn't exist east of the Rockies, so don't get too bent out of shape about the brand. What you want to look for to determine if it's real yogurt:
  • Has acidophilus and/or bifidus listed in the ingredients
  • Has close to 1:1 ratio of protein to sugar
  • DOES NOT CONTAIN ASPERTAME or stevia or any other sweeteners
  • Is plain, no flavor even vanilla
  • Tastes tangy, has texture that you like
  • Whole milk, not low fat or no fat
First step is to bring ~1.5 cups of store-bought yogurt to room temperature. This takes about 2 hours so you want to make sure you do it first. I like putting it in a mason jar because mason jars have lids and they are pretty easy to gauge temperature by touching the outside of the glass.



Double boil milk. This should be whole milk, like 4% milkfat. The way I do a double-boil is I have a three pot set (Ikea's cheapest aluminum set) and I use the medium and the large pots. I fill the large pot with water and then fill the medium pot with milk. The point of a double boil is that the water boiling regulates the heat (water boils at a constant 100C) so the milk's temperature comes up slowly and can be controlled. DO NOT try to boil milk in a kettle. It is DISASTROUS and the cleanup alone may cost you the deposit on your first apartment. Double boiling doesn't have to be fancy, the setup we have was ~$45 at Ikea for 3 pots. That was several years ago, but still, Ikea is wonderful.

One of the most pretentious ways I've ever read to boil milk is "stir eleven times clockwise followed by eleven times counterclockwise until vapors arise." While probably a good way to make a potion, definitely not required for making yogurt. Boiling milk looks like lots of teeny bubbles and the top looks like what you get with a latte, rather than the giant bubbles of boiling water. Milk is a lot more viscus so mind that you don't let it boil over the pot because it has a tendency to REALLY over boil.


Once you get your whole interior pot boiling, remove about 1.5 cups in a heat-safe bowl. The bowl should be about twice as big, able to contain at least 3 cups.



Cover. Did I mention I like things that come with lids? Because plates are not super effective lids...

Let your cold yogurt and hot milk both equilibrate to room temperature. Set a timer for 1 hr and check back.

Meanwhile you can just cover the interior pot of the double-boil and take it out of the water. It should hold its heat nicely for an hour.

ONE HOUR LATER or maybe more if your food is stubborn

Carefully whisk the yogurt into the cooled, now room temperature milk. During this step you want to break up any and all clumps! Whisk smoothly and try as best you can to get the yogurt evenly distributed.

Slowly whisk/fold the bowl of milk seeded with yogurt into the main pot of hot milk. Again, keep it frothy and make sure there are no clumps. After the whole 3 cups is reincorporated stir for a bit to make sure that it's well mixed.

Cover and place in oven. THE OVEN NEEDS TO BE OFF FOR THIS STEP. Mostly you want to encourage the bacteria in the yogurt to grow so your seeded yogurt needs to sleep in a warm environment. The heating pad method is good if you don't have a pilot light but it's not great if you plan to sleep during the incubation period. Most heating pads have auto-off settings after 4 hrs. You want the yogurt to incubate for 8-12 hours.

8 TO 12 HOURS LATER

Take yogurt out of oven and check that it looks like yogurt. One thing that may happen is that a lot of watery/milky fluid will be on the top. That's WHEY! Congrats you're on your whey to making the best pancakes of your life. (The recipe is very full of itself but they are indeed the best pancakes I've ever had.) If you don't have that, don't worry we can make some in the next steps. However, if you have ~1in of whey you might have curdled your yogurt. Most of the times I've done this (yeah...more than once...) it's because I didn't let the hot milk cool and/or the yogurt get to room temp first. Sometimes it's salvageable and sometimes it isn't. I'm really really sorry if it isn't, especially given how hard it is to get more milk from the store nowadays. :<

THAT'S IT. THAT'S YOGURT, YOU MADE IT, GOOD JOB!

The next bit is only if you want to get fancy or the texture isn't quite to your liking.


Cut some cheesecloth to fit over a colander and then place in a big bowl. Doesn't have to be metal, that's just what I have. I like using my crinkle-cut fabric scissors for the cheesecloth because I've failed many times trying to use other scissors. The cheesecloth doesn't have to be folded over or doubled-back or anything, just be reasonably sure it won't rip.


Did you know that ladles come in sizes?! I didn't know this until I rented space in an industrial kitchen. The ladle I'm using here is a 4 oz ladle. It's handy to know how much volume you're processing. Transfer yogurt into cheesecloth colander.

Stir the yogurt and move it around, making sure to kinda, scrape along and underneath where it contacts with the cheesecloth. Like any other straining event, you want the thicker stuff up top and mush it around such that the thinner stuff can get into through the straining device and into the bowl.


Once you've gotten a good amount of whey or left it for 10ish minutes (or until you get bored) go ahead and plop it into a container. I use a 64oz yogurt container. I eat a lot of yogurt. I can't eat eggs. I dread breakfast. Anyway. I have one of these large containers. You may not. I advise lots of wide mouth mason jars with the two-part lids.


The whey will come through the cheesecloth and then I pour it into a widemouth mason jar. Told you I'm in love with those things. I cry every time I break one.

Et voila! Preposterous amount of yogurt and a decent amount of whey!

Yay!

Extra photos of the pancakes we made from the whey:

Friday, March 16, 2018

PeopleKeeper 2-A Follow Up

Hey all,
I finally got a half-day off and thought it was time to write down some of the thoughts bouncing around in my mind. The technical term for this is idea saltation. It’s a term that I’ve just made up. ::Eddie Izzard voice:: And I’m backing it up with…this geology license I hope to get.

So here is my view for writing today:
This is actually my reality, I can't believe it sometimes.

 It’s cool and windy and mostly clear out, I’ve got a box of Girl Scout cookies and a lot of sunlight left so buckle up because I’m sure this will be a wild ride.
 
A recent photo of me, ready made for a by-line
In the past seven months (whoosh, that went by right quick) I have been working at a job I love with fascinating people whom I am happy to hang out with for a drink after work. My office works with other offices all over the country so I get to meet folks with very different backgrounds and skill sets than my own. My current work priorities for personal development on the job are:

  • ·      Consistent demeanor-keeping the same quality and frequency of communication regardless of what’s happening in my personal or personal-professional life (eg. deadlines).
  • ·      Learning how to actually talk to anyone- a misnomer that a lot of my friends have is that I can strike up a conversation with anyone. While this has proved true for most of the circles I have waltzed between in my life, it’s not the case across the board. Specifically: I have been learning how to interact with military personnel better. I have a lot of inherited trauma around military folks, through no fault of the people who passed it on, yet it still remains. It so happens that the branch of military my grandfather (who was an abusive ass) served is the same branch that I work with regularly for my job.
  • ·     Communication!- Deadlines, expectations, duration of work, intensity of work, boundaries around topics that I feel OK talking about, boundaries when topics I don’t feel OK talking about.
  • ·      Programming-I’m finally learning how to code in Python. Because it just seems like a better idea than doing everything manually. I’ve also become significantly more proficient in Microsoft Excel, which has eased some of my pain. And I mean literal pain, my ergo situation is ever-evolving and not close to being pain-free. Despite being an A+ couch potato, it seems being sedentary is not easy for me.
So that’s what I’m working on. It’s hard. I won’t pretend or assume it’s anything but hard.

In the past 7 months I’ve thought a lot about my relationships and how they are interwoven into my mental health. I work A Lot, my availability in general has decreased, possibly a hundredfold from my availability when I was unemployed. During my unemployment I focused a lot on building relationships; strengthening, deepening, evaluating, asking a lot, giving back a lot, building my friends up, letting my friends support me.

Between personality and circumstance, I’ve always been in touch with A Lot™ of people. Once my therapist asked me to make a map so she could keep up with all the people I talked about. I got to several hundred people in visual format similar to a force directed diagram before I gave up. This was at least 3 years before Facebook. I remember people’s names, their faces, their stories, their joys, and their pain. Especially when I’m rested and focused like I was during my unemployment. Now that I’m fully employed, I don’t have the bandwidth that I used to and I’m noticing that I’m not as capable of managing all the relationships.

On top of my proving period (about 5 months of nearly back to back travel) being physically and emotionally challenging, I took on another challenge: get the first part of my geology licensure. The department of Professional Geologists in the Golden State are trying to mimic the process the Engineers have laid out. I’m certain it also behooves the geologists because it gets them more money. What this means for me, the SaraBe, is that I can take a $500 test now (3 years out of school) and then take another $500 test in 3 more years so that I can sign legal documents. The only study material available is not only boring: it’s badly written, incorrect more times than is acceptable, out of touch and really poor at explaining how to pivot one’s background in academia into industry. I am going to write a competing study guide and publish it when I have my license in 3-5 years. Testing for competence shouldn’t be an endurance test in masochism.

In order to achieve this goal of studying and taking my exam (which I took this morning) I have shifted around my life a lot. This shifting, as with all my shifts, has led me to evaluate my relationships, and check in with where I was a year(ish) ago when I wrote my PeopleKeeper post. I’m going to break out the types of relationships I’ve seen evolve in the past year, moving from negative to positive. Unsurprisingly, there will be a playlist for these categories so be sure to click on links for music. (In addition to my regular play list for the blog at large.)


Brief content warning: mention of rape and stalking. Click this if you want to skip that.

Contact Severed

Only a couple people from my original list (or people who weren’t on the list but existed regularly in my life) were people who I actively severed contact with.

One of them was accused of being a serial rapist. I was not close with this person, I had no direct involvement in these allegations and I did not follow what/if the resolution on this series of events was. I know this person was an active organizer whose parties I occasionally attended but it wasn’t difficult for me to fade from that scene when I was on the road 70% of the time. The whole affair was triggering for me as I was much more intimately involved in something similar when I was 13 so I noped out pretty hard pretty quick.

The other person was someone whose friendship had always been exhausting for me but over the past couple years it built up to the point where they were stalking me. This is someone who I cannot avoid completely because they attend my synagogue but the leadership of the shul took care of the situation in as much as they could. This was extremely difficult for me because there were weeks where I couldn’t attend services because I just had panic attacks. PartnerPenguin was amazing in taking care of me and making sure I left when I needed to leave and breathed as much as I could. Mega props to the current leadership body for listening to me, taking me seriously and treating the situation with gravity.

The Somebodies I Used To Know

This category is a little less cut and dry from my previous category and it’s probably the category I struggle the most with. These are not people who have acutely wronged me, just more…death by a thousand paper cuts. A lot of my biological relatives are in this category. People who have occasionally made my swear allegiance or loyalty but who have never actually been interested in me as a person.

An illustration of this kind of person was someone whom I hadn’t seen in months and we finally spend much of an evening together. They asked me how I was doing and I spent care and energy into responding how was drowning in work but they were important to me so I carved out an evening to spend with them. Throughout the evening they then asked me three more times how I was doing, closing out the evening with “we should catch up some time.” This was painful, but ultimately it made me realize that listening to me was not a priority for this person and there was nothing I could do about it.

Standard Partiers

I like to grow my friendships in predominately 1:1 settings, often revolving around food, often at my house. My relationship bonds strengthen best during long-ish periods of unstructured or semi-structured time together, so I try to create such spaces. Some people like to maintain their relationships through parties (usually >10 people), touching base periodically and superficially. I am happy to attend these parties but I’ve learned that I’m not going to bank on the friendships I cultivate in these spaces to be deep enough for strong emotional support unless I supplement them with other types of interactions.

Don't get me wrong. I love partying. I just don't expect to do most of my heavy lifting in my friendships in this context. 


Several people who I had on my PeopleKeeper list interact with their relationships in a way that I had not understood previous to trying this experiment: their partner performs most of the friendship maintenance. I have seen several pairings of people who do this. The level of emotional labor expected by society, usually on women, to maintain relationships, plan free time and keep house to have friends over shines through when I have tried to maintain friendships with people whose partner does a lot of their emotional labor. I have trouble getting in touch with some of these people. One person appeared randomly back in my life after 3 years of no contact because they were in a relationship and just…didn’t keep in touch with any of their friends. Even with my best friends, I have sometimes given up on being friends with their spouses because they just don’t put any work into being my friend in return and assume their partner will maintain that bond. But usually when I show up in person they listen to me so they are neutral to me.

Everything’s Easy/The Simcha (Joy) Bringers

I have several communities right now that I participate in regularly given the locational availability and energy level.

The first is my weekly gaming group who meet the host’s home, and usually have 10 people or less per event. We have dinner together and there is always SaraSafe food (no nightshades) even if means the host makes a separate meal just for me. Sometimes it’s tacos (we gather on Tuesday, after all) and sometimes it’s sous-vide pork cheek or <three-stroke meat engine> that have cooked for at least 12 hours. Sometimes I participate in games like <Colors, Fucking Colors>, sometimes I don’t. And it’s always OK. Everyone sees each other weekly so we generally know what’s going on in each others lives. It’s friendship on easy mode.

One thing that’s great about this group is that the two people who host recently got married and I got to see for the first time a wedding that reflected something much closer to what I want in a wedding ceremony (we’ll have one someday, I swear). The bridal party was not split by bride and groom because everyone was everyone’s friend. The women wore dresses and the men wore suits and everyone was color matched and lovely in that formality. The vows were said in a “yes, and” fashion: the bridge said one line and the groom responded “I’ll do that and this additional thing”. The officient was a friend and he made no presumption of having God involved (which worked, for this crowd). After the bride and groom exchanged vows, the audience was invited to vow to support the couple. I really liked that.

I was so full of joy and love that I cried the whole night. In fact I cried so much that salt crystals formed on my eyes:

I cried myself some minerals!

Other communities I have in this category are my shul, my other regular gaming groups, and the friends I see rarely but spend time with intensely throughout the year. And of course, my travel buddies. In the past couple years I’ve brought my “states visited” count up to 23. Here are some photos from some of the more recent trips:

The great and powerful Mississippi River
....yes....
American Victoria Falls

Buddy, your soul is supposed to stay inside your body. So's your skeleton.

Crappy quality but I did see the Northern Lights

Just a pup in -10°F being OK with life.


With the national political situation, my job being as intense as it is and interfacing with my own and my friends mental illnesses it feels extraordinarily good to have good friends and celebrate happy events. It reminds me that there is balance and that this past year has been net good.


The best thing about being a queer adult is that the concept of Found Family is understood and, while not ubiquitous, is prevalent. My little group of new family are the people whom I can be around, no matter how we’re feeling and it’s OK that we’re not entertaining or happy. We can just be. It’s extremely freeing to have multiple people with whom I can just be my complete self.

I had a lot of negative experiences growing up where I was told that we were having family time and that would mean we would “have fun, damnit.” I think sometimes when I reflect on the nuclear family I had growing up that none of us understood how to be there for each other in the ways we needed to be supported. Instead there was a lot of shame and at time coercion to “act like we liked each other” instead of genuinely liking each other.

The intentionality I’ve brought to my new family folks is that when you’re in my found family you’re in as your whole self. That’s hard and takes a lot of work on all parties involved, so there are only a few people who hold this place in my life. I think one of the most important conversations I ever had was with someone who holds me in found family status and they explained that I had committed a transgression serious enough to cut ties unless I made swift and lasting change to my behavior. Having this conversation allowed me to see that just because this category exists, it doesn’t mean that abuse or bad behavior has to be tolerated.

A surprise for me in this past year is how big of a difference having a found family has made on my spiritual life. I am regularly celebrating smaller Jewish holidays that I’ve never celebrated before because I have the support to do so. We have more conversation around Judaism than I’ve ever had voluntarily in my life. I like the amount of Judaism I’ve worked in and I feel supported to include more if it seems right to do so.


I am happy to announce that PartnerPenguin and I have celebrated our first decade together! 10 whole years of being awesome! The best part about renewing for an 11th season of this show is that we jumped the shark somewhere in…like…season 2? So there’s nowhere more ridiculous for us to go. We’re still two goofballs with odd senses of humor who make each other laugh every day. We’ve learned to have arguments without putting the foundation of our relationship at stake. We have established that we’re not going anywhere so it’s OK to try new things and get out of our comfort zone. I am proud of us. I was trying to only do two comparison photos but then I did 4. GIANT, PHOTO LADEL BLOG POST FOR ALL!

Casual then-shirts read Feztival (2002) and Vader was Framed

Even our casual now looks like we're about to drop an emo album

Fancy then-Rockin' that Moulin Rouge themed Prom

Yeah, basically still rockin' the same theme with no prompts

I do hope to have some sort of wedding, probably about 3 years from now on the 10th anniversary of us being married. That seems like enough time to ease into the idea, save, plan and decide what we want the event to be. In the meantime I’ve started wearing a ring that I feel suits me on an everyday basis. I think it looks like it fell out of a mountain and happens to fit my finger. You can decide for youself:
I am really really excited about this

In closing today, I’ll just leave you with Janelle Monae’s “Make Me Feel” or: “I am exactly as bisexual as I thought I was.


Sunday, January 7, 2018

Real Urban Geologists Drink Tap

Dear Friends,

As you may have seen, the NYT has published some new kind of foolishness about a topic I hold near and dear to my heart: water access in America. “Unfiltered Fervor: The Rush to Get Off the Water Grid” is about how wealthy people are drinking untreated water.

Publishing this story gives this topic attention, fueling distrust of government by presenting the raw water movement on equal footing to scientific fact. Tacitly condoning consumption of unfiltered water that has not passed rigorous drinking standards gives this practice validity. Drinking water at a surface spring is more likely to seriously harm than to be beneficial to health.

Stick with a "look, don't drink" policy when going to unknown creeks.

American’s has some of the safest water because of our extensive processing of subsurface water. Ground water, both municipal and private wells, are monitored and tested at regular intervals to ensure safety.

By portraying “raw water” as a phenomenon by entrepreneurs selling an “off the grid” lifestyle this article also draws attention away from the misallocation of capital that desires to create a dangerous product for the rich rather than ensuring everyone in America can drink their tap water for today and tomorrow.

Rather than fund production of this one guy who admits to trespassing and stealing water could capital not flow to any of these issues? 

  •       Incorporating desalinization for cities with changing water availability due to sea level rise.
  •       Replacing lead water pipes in Flint, MI with steel water pipes.
  •       Using publicly available data to target municipal treatment facilities for specific problems and hiring engineers, geologists and scientists to create more efficient treatment systems so toxins like hexavalent chromium didn’t exist in public water
  •       Creating and sustaining public health non nonprofits that focus on community access to safe, clean water

We cannot claim to be a first world nation when people cannot access safe drinking water-- one of the things that we've done mostly right for a long time. Giving attention and money to any regressive, dangerous ideas is investing in the ruin of our nation.


The anti-municipal water movement that has united the anti-establishment fringe groups from both the left and right. However, the ‘establishment’ being protested with "Live water" is not the President, Congress, or Washington DC, but local civil servants in our communities, whose meetings are generally open to the public.

In California, the State Water Control Board regulates all of the municipal and county agencies that provide water directly to residents. Working with the state and federal EPA, the Water Board ensures the safety and access to water all Californians’ are entitled to. These water boards require an extensive, multi-month vetting process before hiring anyone.

My home city, Oakland, has established the aggressive goal of zero waste by 2020. They are using multiple tactics; educating restaurants and auto businesses on best management practices for preventing pollution, establishing an illegal dumping hotline, and disseminating freely available information about the difference between sanitary sewer vs storm drain systems.

By contrast, the interviewed entrepreneurs are rushing to get off the grid with their water consumption. AMr. Singh says he is concerned about “drinking toilet water with birth control drugs” they would be much better served to participate in pre-existing programs by the Department of Toxic Substance Control to educate and promote cessation of improper pharmaceutical disposal.

We know from science and medicine that drinking “raw water” is a bad idea. Yet in the article, six proponents of untreated water are quoted before a medical professional advises against it. This narrative lends equal footing between the raw water movement and the medical and scientific communities, establishing false equivalency; science can be disregarded when it contradicts the emotions of the beholder.

Many Americas view scientists as lofty elites, whose conclusions are opinions, up for debate. Promoting raw water with this article lacks the integrity The New York Times stands for in its mission statement. If the NYT’s intention is to support science, scientists and scientific thought then the editors of this publication need to do better in ensuring articles like this do not work against that priority.

Sincerely,
Sara Be

A Geologist Who Drinks Tap

P.S. This song goes out to Flint, MI.