I'm going to spare you the gory details and a description of my degree of stress and upset yesterday. To make a long story short, I have recovered the functionality of my back up drive. I am currently backing up my backup............
This still leaves me with a loss of every kit I've started and finished in the last month. I will also have lost anything I unzipped and moved to the G drive from my download area in that time frame. It still stinks but I am ever so grateful not to be out of business.
I have a huge stash of design tools. Some of this stuff I purchased up to 5 years ago. The designers have since gone out of business. These items could NEVER be recovered. I recently used a star overlay to create a paper. That particular overlay was purchased from a designer who went out of business more than 2 years ago. But, a star overlay is a star overlay. Stars don't get dated. So the overlay is still useful and usable. But, it and many other overlays of the same vintage are still with me, Thank God, and I can still use them to add variety to my kits.
I had help on all this and I don't want to fail to give credit where credit is due. Jim, my friend's husband, advised me and his advice was priceless.
I will, no doubt, be wading through the records in my paypal account to see what I can recover amongst my recent purchases. MOST of my purchases since May have been from one particular store. I re-downloaded them this morning. But the search will go on for a few days, no doubt.
Then I have to find out how to fix what my offsite backup service is up to. It is essentially backing up only one file when there are any number of important files on the drive. I've prowled around their site A LOT but haven't been able to crack the code on what to do to fix that so I'll have to be e-mailing customer service.........
The project for last night and this morning has been trying my hand at making homemade yogurt in the crockpot. I mentioned this a few days ago when I had purchased the supplies. I am not thrilled with the results. Maybe I'm just being too picky, but my end product is very liquidy. To eat with a spoon, you'd have to slurp it like soup. You COULD drink it like those yogurt drinks that are popular. However, I wanted Greek Yogurt I could use for cooking and eating, not drinking. Consequently, I have had strainers lined with coffee filters, balanced atop bowls, all over my kitchen for hours. Yes, I have been able to get some of the liquid out, but it is a slow and frustrating process for a lady who wants to eat some homemade Greek Yogurt NOW.
Looking at the photo on the original blog post, her result is definitely thicker than what I have. And she says it will thicken in the fridge. Well, with what I've got, I'm not too sure it would thicken if I froze it, LOL. The recipe she posted seems to work for her. It includes only two ingredients and 3 steps so I'm pretty sure I didn't screw that up. I am, at this point, blaming my crockpot, or, more specifically, the differences between crockpots.
Here is the process as described in this post from Bless This Mess. Put 8 cups whole milk into a crockpot. Turn the crockpot on low for 2.5 hours and go about your business. At the end of 2.5 hours, unplug your crockpot and leave it alone for 3 hours. At the three hour mark, wrap your crockpot in a blanket or a couple of heavy towels and leave it alone again for 8-12 hours.
By the way, I have also tried straining the finished product through cheesecloth. That went a lot faster but I did not like it for a couple of reasons: 1) when I strain through the coffee filter, the liquid is clear with a slight yellowy tinge; strained through the cheesecloth, I can see that some of the milk solids are being lost. 2) When straining through a coffee filter, you can carefully scrape it down with a spatula and have very little waste; good luck with that when using cheesecloth!
Will I try this again? I can't honestly say for sure. But, I think, if I did, I would either add a larger proportion of yogurt with active cultures to the mix or substitute some heavy cream for some of the milk. I REALLY want to make this at home and have it when I want it, but as it turns out, what I thought would involve very little prep time and produce just what I wanted, is taking forever because of the straining. I've priced yogurt makers on Amazon. I really don't want to allocate funds to that if I can avoid it which is why I was SO thrilled when I found this crockpot recipe............
Well, besides running back and forth to the kitchen to check on strainers, I can't honestly tell you what I will get done today. I am running out there about every 20 minutes to dump the accumulated liquid, stir the stuff in the strainer, etc. And by the time I've gone through all that, about 10 minutes has passed. In other words, yogurt-making is taking at least 1/3 of my available time today. I am not amused with that!
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