The yoghurt went down a storm. Quite a relief, really, as we’d not had time to test it ourselves before serving it up to our guests. Rather than flavour the whole batch, we whizzed up some canned raspberries with a generous serving of icing sugar and put that in a ramekin so our guests could help themselves and mix some in.
By the end of Christmas, this was all we had left of a full litre batch of yoghurt:
Left-over yoghurt
Of course, we used some of it as the starter culture for our next batch, which we made last night and decanted from the flask this morning, but it’s pretty good going. There’s only a spoonful in that bowl. We’ll be using the second batch as dessert tonight, as we have the neighbours around for dinner.
It feels good to have made a second batch from the first. Our yoghurt is now second generation, and apart from some milk we’ve not had to buy anything to make this second load.
The chickens have still not been laying much, but they have been enjoying our left-overs. They really went for some vegetable pie (above) and were no less enthusiastic about the one portion of lasagne that didn’t get eaten. There’s certainly no waste when you have chickens in the garden.
The beer was a little less successful, mainly because we’ve not had time to let it mature in the bottles. We only finished brewing it a fortnight ago, so it should improve over the next few weeks. Apart from the bottles we gave away to the neighbours in their Christmas hampers, we have almost all of our stock of 35 bottles in tact.
The only other home-made alcohol we managed to foist upon our guests (none of them wanted to try the wine when they knew we had two cases of commercial headache inducers in the pantry) was the blackcurrant liqueur, which tastes great. It took the whole of this year’s harvest of blackcurrants to make and needs to be strained to get rid of the bits, but it’s certainly something we’ll make again next year.
All in all, then, a fairly successful self-sufficient Christmas.
In some quarters, at least.
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