How To Make Ever-Lasting Yogurt

Well, it's not eternal, but you can repeat it maybe five times with the same starter. This yogurt recipe is from Lynda, a friend from St. Lucia. Try it and tell me hour it goes!

Ingredients:

• Powdered milk (We use Nido, but I would look for another company if available only because I have a bias against Nestle for their actions against breast feeding. Thanks Vickie Nizin!)
• a 6 to 8 oz. yogurt starter that says "live and active cultures" on the container
• water
• food coloring (If you want to be creative like Cristina.)

Boil the water then let sit until it cools down to "baby bottle hot," in Lynda's words. We tried heating it up and stopping before it got too hot to save gas, but we haven't had success with this yet. If the water is too hot, the bacteria will die. If it's too cold, it won't mix well. We've quite a few bad batches figuring out what the temperature should be.

Mix the heated water with the powdered milk with a 3:1 ratio (3 cups water for each 1 cup of powder). We usually make 9 cups water/3 cups po wder at a time. Stir with an eggbeater or that thing with two spinning wisk-like dealies until all power is dissolved and maybe a little longer. Put some of this mixture in the container with yogurt in it. Stir/shake that up. Pour it back in the big mix and stir until all clumps are gone.

Put about a cup of the mix into an old, cleaned out peanut butter jar or the like. This will be your starter for the next batch. Put the rest of the mix into a large tuperware container or whatever works. Put the two containers in a dry place like the oven. Lynda said they should sit for 6 hours, but we usually leave it over night, which winds up being 12 or 13 hours. Stir. Enjoy.

Serving suggestion:
Have it for breakfast with a bit of muesli or granola and a little bit of maple syrup. YUM!