Two Firsts

So, last week I became the proud parent to a new ice cream maker and today I got to christen it! I was very excited and it was super easy and fun. That is obviously one of my firsts, the second is that on Monday I made my own yogurt for the first time. The recipe...if you can really call it that...was found in Jamie Oliver's-The Naked Chef Takes Off.

I had half of a quart of milk left over that was almost to its used by date and rather than just throw it away, I decided to use it for Jamie's yogurt recipe that I had seen a couple of weeks ago. The recipe called for whole milk and I had 1%, so I didn't know if it was going to turn out or not. But, I am pleased to say, it was just great. Probably not as thick as some might like it, but still a pretty good consistency. All you do for this recipe is bring 41/2 cups of milk to the boil, cool to body temperature, then add 160z of natural, active yogurt and leave covered for 6-8 hours. I just left mine overnight, then put into the fridge.



This made a lot of yogurt and quite frankly I was wondering what to do with it all. I know I want to use some for a muesli recipe this weekend, but I didn't think I would be able to get through the rest. But then, of course!!.....I remembered the spanking new ice cream machine. What if I used the yogurt to make frozen yogurt?? Great!! So I spent a few minutes hunting around for frozen yogurt recipes and decided to use one on David Lebovitz's blog for my inspiration. His recipe utilises fresh strawberries, of which I didn't have. But I did have some frozen ones taking up space in my freezer. Unfortunately his recipe called for 1lb of strawberries, again, I did not have that much, but I did have some frozen peaches as well. So, I figured I would just add them together and see how it turned out.

Its my first go, right? It probably won't work the first time round, right? Well, let me just say I was pleasantly surprised. Not only was making frozen yogurt loads of fun, the resulting product tasted absolutely delicious!! And not to bad for you either, as it utilized 1% milk.

All I did was blend the frozen berries and peaches with 2/3 cup of sugar and 1 cup of yogurt. The fruit was already frozen and cold, so I didn't even need to refrigerate for any time, then I just put it into the frozen bowl of the ice cream maker for about 30-40 minutes.




This is probably not the recipe I would have used to christen my fabulous new machine if I could have picked anything, but I wanted to use what I already had and let me just say, that this was a mighty tasty way to use them :)