Oh that Cheap Culture!

I remember when  I was a little kid, I tried yogurt and freaked.  The sour taste was so foreign to my taste buds at that point in my life.  If you were to tell me back then that I would grow to love the stuff, that it was highly beneficial to my health and that I would become obsessed with using it to cook with and further, that I would even make it myself...well I would have said the equivalent to "whatever"...I don' remember what we said back then...hmmm.  Oh well it was sometime after groovy and bitchen but waaay before sick...

As is the case for most of us, our palates mature and change and suddenly things we hated we can't get enough of.  As was the case with yogurt, when I tried it again a few years later, I liked the sourish sweet taste.  Then I really got into a health kick and found out about all the good cultures in yogurt that were keeping my digestive tract happy.  So I was sold.  I learned to substitute it for sour cream, to use it in place of buttermilk in recipes and to eat flavored greek yogurt instead of reaching for a big sugary bowl of pudding or ice cream.  Sometimes I fail at this strategy, when Dreyer's Rocky Road calls out my name all the way from the frozen section at the market, but hey, I'm human.   If you go somewhere like Whole Foods, there are a ton of different types of yogurt with all sorts of flavors from pomegranate to fig to kiwi.  Trader Joe's has their own brand of honey flavored greek yogurt that is sooooo good.  There is even goat milk yogurt...just as long as they don't carry the bat milk yogurt that Lily Munster was so fond of! (I hope you remember that!)

I always have plain non-fat yogurt on hand in my refrigerator. I buy the large 32 ounce size in the regular grocery store.  There is always one of the brands on sale, sometimes at the two for one price.  Plain yogurt has a very long refrigerator shelf life to boot. I can eat it at breakfast and add good stuff to it like walnuts and dates and honey.  I use it in buttermilk pancakes instead of the buttermilk, I use it in most cases when a recipe calls for sour cream.  If you eat plain yogurt on a regular basis, your taste buds really do grow to love it.  At that point, using it on a baked potato is really good and your cutting out all of the bad fats in sour cream and getting all those little beneficial bacterium!  I use it in soups that call for cream, but in those cases I am more apt to use low fat instead of non fat...a bit more richness goes a long way when it comes to soup recipes.

I like to make my own yogurt because its highly cost effective and its very easy to do.  I bought myself a yogurt maker on-line a few years ago. I can control what type of milk; whole, 2 percent, 1 percent, goats milk. I can control the flavoring too. I tend to use vanilla and honey as my flavorings.  I haven't gone to making greek yogurt yet.  This involves whole cream as one of the ingredients and I try to keep that out of the house.  I  treat myself to this richer yogurt in place of pudding or ice cream now and then, but no matter how you shake it, its got whole cream...eating it daily would mean new bigger jeans for sure!

If you go looking within your favorite search engine under yogurt recipes, you will find an endless sea of em.  From baking to savory dishes.  I have tried many.  Indian food recipes tend to have yogurt in many recipes as well as many Lebanese recipes.  I have found that baked goods made with yogurt turn out moister too.

I recall a Danon Yogurt commercial where there was a village in Romania or somewhere in that region where the average life span was way way up high and you see the older villagers...mothers of mothers, mothers...older but happy and healthy and making claims that they eat yogurt every day...I really feel there is some basis for this...your keeping your digestive tract happy...and this is key to our existence.  Enough said.

A happy digestive tract to all!

robert