I Made Bread, Yogurt and Got a Haircut!

It was a beautiful bread day!

OK - I doubled the recipe, reading very carefully to be sure I was doubling a one-loaf recipe and not a two-loaf recipe. It was a new recipe, and boy did it rise! So I checked again - yes "shape the loaf" - singular, one loaf.

So I shaped, and baked my two loaves -

Two HUGE DAGWOODIAN sandwich loaves - so I went and triple checked - recipe makes one 9x5 free-form loaf, so next time I will double it for three! Meanwhile it is huge and yummy!

Yogurt

- here is how I grow the culture in a cooler with a bottle or two of hot water inside to provide the warmth. I usually make a quart of milk at a time, and fill the empty bottle with hot tap water then place it in the cooler while I heat and cool the milk. Using a bit stainless steel pot, I heat the milk to 180 then let it cool to about 110. The heat kills off any existing bacteria in the milk. Then I stir in a heaping spoonful of yogurt from the last batch, (or if I ate it all, I use plain Stonybrook farm or something with live cultres) and pour the culture milk into 2 or 3 pyrex containers. When I put the containers into the now warm cooler, I re-fill the bottle with hot tap water and close everything up (make sure your yogurt containers fit into the cooler along with the hot water) then I cover and let it sit, usually it takes overnight. In this photo, you can see I did not check for fit first, so I used 3 of those rubbermaid drink bottles instead of the quart milk bottle.

Haircut

- I have been growing my hair out because I am lazy and cheap, then figured I'd really grow it while I was at it and donate the hair to the Pantene Beautiful Lengths program, I grew 15 inches:

Before:

after:

One 15-inch Ponytail!