Making yogurt

Along with bread making, I've been hunting out the perfect home yogurt recipe over the last few weeks. As with bread, I used to make my own yogurt, but then delicious organic yogurt became available and it seemed easier to buy it.

Of late, we've been looking at ways of reducing our income, I'm working less at the day job so I can spend more time doing the things that make my heart sing and therefore we need to reduce our spending. The cost of our delicious organic yogurt is quite expensive, plus the cost to the environment of every plastic pot makes me less than comfortable.

Last year we bought an EasiYo kit, sadly, the yogurt made from their packets wasn't that pleasant, not like the thick delicious yogurt that we preferred, so I abandoned making it. However, the EasiYo kit has been brought back as its the perfect environment to incubate delicious, creamy, thick, yogurt.

I asked RL, Twitter, FB friends how they made their yogurt and the consensus was the same, use good organic full cream milk, the addition of dried milk powder and a good yogurt starter to start the first batch and then go on with your own.

So, here's the mix I gleaned from everyone and after a few attempts I now get perfect thick, creamy, rich and healthy yogurt.

3 and a half cups organic unhomogenised milk
1/2 a cup of organic milk powder
2 large tablespoons of good quality yogurt culture - bring up to room temperature

Mix liquid and powdered milk together and then heat the milk till just under boiling point. Heating the milk both assists the yogurt in thickening and kills nasty bacteria that you don't want to incubate. Let it cool to around 42 - 39 C. Once cool, mix in the two tablespoons of yogurt, then pour into your container to incubate. I put it into the EasiYo plastic bottle, then pour hot water into the EasiYo incubater but only up to the bottom of the red stopper. Put your bottle in and leave for at least 6 hours (I leave overnight), then refrigerate, and once cool, enjoy.

If you don't have an EasiYo incubator you can use a wide mouth thermos for exactly the same result.

So we are saving money, enjoying the pleasure of creating something ourselves and have reduced our plastic intake.

Hip Pocket Sustainability

We have spent the last eight years tweeking our 40 year old suburban house from an non-sustainable one, to a house that helps to save both the planet and our hip pocket through economic and environmental sustainability measures.

We have decided to move on however, as this house has too big a foot print for two people and so we have bought a much smaller cottage further up the mountain.

We wanted to tell potential buyers what we had done to the house and I thought I'd share these tips on Blue Mountain Bliss so others may be inspired to do the same. We are looking forward to doing it all again (and more) at out new (old) cottage.

Hip pocket sustainability

• Solar Power generation system of 1Kilowatt per hour – enough to power the whole house and all modern appliances during the day and sometimes put power back into the grid, so you only pay for power for part of the night.

• Solar Powered Hot Water System, with Gas booster – hot water on tap all the time, heated by the sun, and boosted by efficient natural gas for those rainy days or a relaxing spa bath after work.

• 10,000 Litre Rainwater Tanks – Sparkling fresh rain water, filtered three times before the tank to prevent contaminants like leaves etc. Linked to the mains so you never run out of water, but only pay for it when the tanks run dry. Flushes the loos, washes your clothes, and wets the dishes all for free, and good enough to drink through the chemical-free-filtered kitchen tap. Powered by a small pump to ensure the rainwater gets upstairs with no hassles.

• Full insulation in ceiling and underfloor – makes sure the heat you generate in winter stays inside to keep you warm in winter and in summer stops heat from entering from outside.

• Whirly gig in roof – spins to extract hot air from your roof space if summer heat does start to creep in.

• Silicone strengthened external bagging – the bagging itself tends to protect brickwork but the improvement of adding silicone to the mix ensures it repels heat from the outside and stops heat from leaching though the bricks from inside in winter. When we had this done a couple of years ago, the summer temperature inside the house dropped by about 3-4 degrees.

• Natural Gas upstairs and down and gas cooking in the kitchen – Using natural gas has been reported to be more economical, more fuel efficient, and less costly to the environment than electricity, so if there’s been too little sun to make excess power with the solar panels, and you don’t have time to build up the slow combustion fire, you can heat the house cheaply with natural gas.

All these measures mean that living in our house costs considerably less than living in a conventional 3 bedroom house of this size. We have outlaid the cost of fitting these systems. The purchaser will get all the benefits of them.

Earth Hour - think global act local

Its Earth Hour today and we will all (hopefully) be turning off our lights for one hour from 8.30 p.m. to show our concern for the earth's global warming crisis. So its an ideal opportunity to chat about the sustainability measures we've implemented in our community over the last couple of years.

It all started with Get Up's Climate Action Now initiative in 2007 to get online activists to meet in their local area. A group of us took up this challenge, met in a strangers home, got to know each other, formed a local action group and chose our target; we would sign the Kyoto Protocol declaration because the then Howard government wouldn't.

Our aim was to follow the protocol and reduce our carbon emissions by 30% over twelve months and to advertise what we were doing as much as possible within the community. We promoted our efforts in the Blue Mountains Gazette and through hosting community events such as a 'bring your own plate' supper where the Blue Mountains chapter of Ecopella sang to entertain all the brave souls who came to meet like minded strangers in their neighborhood. We found out about the Council's Sustainability Street initiatives and met the local's involved. We ran a couple of stalls to hand out tips and tricks on reducing your carbon footprint at our local shopping centre. We investigated setting up a lower mountains food cooperative, but didn't get it off the ground. All very local and low key, using the Think Globally, Act Locally principle.

What were our personal initiatives? Well we started big with the installation of water tanks to get us off the water grid as much as possible and we replaced our electric hot water system with a solar one, the picture shows the tanks and hotwater set-up and our proud green plumber. Nic changed from a non-sustainable plumbing business to a sustainable one and we were one of his first clients in his new incarnation.

We also implemented less expensive things such as riding our bikes as much as possible and combining the bikes with public transport for longer jaunts, putting water saving devices on all our taps, not using the house's air conditioning or the clothes dryer, shopping locally, buying local produce, consuming less, ensuring the things we bought were Fair trade and noting the 'travel miles'.

Our Climate Action Group has fizzled out sadly, busy people, busy lives, and we never got to evaluate whether any of us reached the 30% goal of reduced carbon emission, but we did raise the profile of sustainability issues within our community, met strangers who became friends and implemented green initiatives in our home, this year we've installed a one kilowatt photovoltaic electricity system and are making our own electricity to contribute to the grid, so a good outcome all round.

I would encourage you to think about how you can think globally but act locally in your own neighborhood to reduce your carbon footprint and make the world a more sustainable place.