Yogurt

Captain's Log, Supplemental

I apologize in advance if this is TMI.

(But you know, if you don’t like TMI stuff, just stop reading.)

So anyway, I’m reading a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat, which is really fascinating to me because I know next to nothing about the French culture.

The book is mostly about the French culture and French mindset, and how that enables French women to control their eating.

(By the way, there are some really yummy looking recipes on the Amazon page that aren’t in the book.)

I especially like how she doesn’t tell people to eliminate things from their diet, but to learn to eventually control your body’s cravings and tendency to overeat with your strength of mind. She calls it “fooling your body” or something like that.

Another thing I like is that, like French women, I don’t care much for exercise. She supports walking 20-30 minutes a day (which I already do) in addition to portion control (which, she says, you learn gradually over a period of time). Both of those things seem rather tantalizing to me.

Really, a lot of it is common sense, but the way she presents it is fun and positive with that French culture flair to make it interesting. I’ve never been to France, but I love French food and would love to go to Paris one day.

Anyway, the point of the blog post is this—she supports eating yogurt twice a day. I have no problem with that, because I direly need the probiotics to keep my intestines happy, if you know what I mean. I’ve been trying to eat yogurt once a day for just that purpose.

I already raved/blogged about the Trader Joe’s French Village Cream Line yogurt, which is just divine. But in the book, she suggests you make your own.

Whoa! Make my own? Sounds very chemistry-set-ish, don’t you think? She gives two recipes, one using a yogurt making machine (which sounds a bit like an incubator like the ones we used in biology research) and another recipe where you leave the milk and yogurt in an oven with a bowl of hot water for several hours.

Now, maybe I’m just paranoid, but even though the milk is incubating yogurt cultures, isn’t it kind of dangerous to leave milk non-refrigerated for any length of time? I am woefully uneducated in the art of making homemade yogurt.

Has anyone done it before? Can you explain/give tips?