Catholic Hearts Domestic Church

We make our own yogurt and the last few times, we’ve been using a simpler method that we LOVE – it’s so easy!

When removing the milk from the pan and placing the jars on the counter, we always notice the layer of cooling milk on top.

This layer is mentioned in the first Great Lesson – The Story of God With No Hands – right before introducing the volcano… so it can easily slip into the recesses of one’s mind when confronted with that *awesome* volcano!

This last yogurt-making was interesting though…

We were both working quietly in the living room and continued to hear a pop – pop – pop. Ever so slight.

Dreading the possibility of a mouse in our apartment, we crept into the kitchen….

and found…

This….

If you listen very carefully you can hear the quiet pop-pops – just barely. There are two other videos as well – both showing the same thing, but we couldn’t decide which one to post!

Give it a try! Boil some milk in a glass jar by placing a 75-90% filled with milk jar into a saucepan of water and cover with a lid. Bring to a boil until the milk is about 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Now use a mitt to remove the jar and place it on the counter. Just let it sit. It won’t take long!

Neat, huh!?

Wanna make yogurt while you’re at it?

If you don’t have a nice consistently warm place, do what we do and place that pan of hot water in a cooler which has been lined with a thick towel. Close the cooler for now to get it nice and warm in there.

(if you want to use raw milk and keep it raw, to make yogurt, you’ll heat only to 110, but will not get a skin on the milk)

When the milk is about 105-110, mix in a spoonful of yogurt with active cultures. Put a lid on the milk culture and place it in the cooler next to the pan (best not to let them touch if the pan is still too hot – you don’t want to kill the yogurt culture). Close the lid.

Come back in 24 hours (usually less but the 24 hours part is easy for us!).

To a pint jar, we add about 1 1/2 tbsp of sweetener (powdered sugar, honey, maple syrup, fruit juice concentrate) and whatever other ingredients you’d like. We are out of vanilla (still waiting for it to finish up) so we’ve been using almond extract – YUM!

Or mixed with homemade granola. YUMMIER!

It’s pretty thick to start, but gets a bit runnier with stirring, so minimize your stirring if you want thick yogurt.

No pectin, no preservatives, our own sweeteners.

AND science!

Can’t beat it!

Yes, those are wide-mouth Ball glass jars – we have been slowly switching over to just using those, instead of re-using other glass jars, because, well, we’re not buying as many other glass jars as we make more and more of our own food from fresh produce. I chose wide-mouth because 1) the food doesn’t clog up underneath a lip and 2) the same lids and rings fit on both pint (think jam) and quart jars – I really need ease of use and mis-matched lids have been hair-pullers in the last year! Now I have multiple sized jars and just one size of lid that fits on all the jars. And everything looks so NICE in the cupboard, fridge and freezer!

After stirring it is just a bit runnier than organic yogurt. Just as thick as well-stirred non-organic yogurt.

In the cooler; we make 4 jars at a time. Saving the last half of one jar as the culture for the next batch.

Grandma was given this kind of rum/vanilla; and we were so happy to find it stocked at Kroger. It has fantastic flavor, so we are excited!

The beans we purchased from Mountain Rose Herbs:

http://www.mountainroseherbs.com/search/search.php?refine=y&keywords=vanilla&x=0&y=0

We have the “1oz Vanilla Bean organic and fair trade“ and it smells right! I do wonder if we got quite the driest beans (apparently you are supposed to use grade B beans – but I also wanted fair trade, etc). These seemed more most than I anticipated. So we’ll see. Either way, it will work from what all sources say – it’s just a nuance

He has been looking at the history of the use of vanilla – and true to Montessori style, we want to look at the PEOPLE involved. Most fascinating is that a 12 year old child worked out how to hand-pollinate the vanilla so that it could be grown outside of the Latin America countries.

Forget gold and corn and other such things – the greatest gift that the Europeans found in the Americas: VANILLA!

Ever had chocolate without it?

We did! Never again, thank you!

We are trying to be good stewards of the earth, while not letting the earth get in the way of the most important gift of human beings: relationship.

It is even better when the two are the same thing

In this case, we are growing mint in our living room. As it grows long, we trim it, hang it to dry, grind it up and make tea… and more… While it is drying (upside down so the oils flow back into the leaves, maximizing their potential), we have a beautiful decoration that makes our home, truly homey. Comforting. And there is a natural inclination towards being with one another in a cozy, homey home

Once it is fully dried, we spend time together pulling the leaves off into a large bowl (easier to collect everything then, transfer in small quantities to the mortar and pestle). I bought a set of 3 of these on Amazon years back (affiliate link there) that have been simply fantastic!

The mint leaves are stored in a jar to use for making tea, or to add to our homemade toothpaste or anywhere else we need some mint flavoring.

That leaves the stems – which are fine for adding to the composting, but well, we have an interesting set up with our apartment management and mouse-traps get pricey when management does little to alleviate the issue. But fresh mint keeps them away.

My mother will cringe when she reads that I tuck these stems in all the places where the mice have been spotted. Despite her cringing, I can confidently report success (so far!) – ice-free and my home smells so nice! We freshen them up when we harvest new mint and THEN we compost the stems. There may be other purposes for them, but that is what we do for now

mint, dried, laying on the stove because our counters were full at the time.

grinding mint leaves with mortar and pestle

Wow. I am still in shock.

As I reflect on the letter I received today (I am typing this on Friday afternoon), I thought I’d share some thoughts that answer some private questions I receive from time to time.

Basically, these questions center around the relationship between Catechesis of the Good Shepherd and Montessori education – for US. In OUR family.

Quote from the acceptance letter:

“With your great Montessori background, it’s easy to want to include many wonderful materials in the atrium, but especially in an atrium used for training, we need to be true to Sofia and Gianna’s understanding of the essential.”

I appreciate what is said here, but I have some concerns as well.

• I came to Montessori THROUGH Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Yes, I found Montessori first, but I had levels 1 and 2 formation in CGS before I went to AMI primary Montessori training. The above statement makes it sound as if Montessori came first. Then level 3 CGS and elementary Montessori training overlapped.
• AMI is foundational. It does not participate in “fluff” and it too focuses on the essentials.
• I have full respect for Sofia and Gianna, and I have equal respect for Maria Montessori. All three ladies focused on the essential with the children, yet Sofia and Gianna’s work was founded on Maria Montessori’s work. This is getting a bit into the chicken/egg syndrome, so the main point is that we canNOT separate the Montessori method from CGS without losing KEY QUALITIES.
• Many of those foundational Montessori principles that are given in CGS formation courses (silence game, walking on the line) are losing their strength in the passing from one adult to the next. But when such exercises are fully present in the atrium, you find children who are centered (normalized), at peace, and working deeply.
• For me personally, CGS informs my application of the Montessori method in the academics far more than Montessori affects my CGS work in the realm of faith formation. I am not necessarily taking the above comment personally, but I do feel it is a blanket statement that reflects a division between the two rather than a recognition of CGS’s roots in Montessori – the condition of the roots reveals the condition of the potential flowering.

Some interesting tidbits on the relationship between CGS and academic Montessori – or how Montessori can and SHOULD apply to CGS:

• Walking on the line and the silence activity are being watered down in CGS and the fruits are not forthcoming. These are *essential* Montessori principles that CGS needs to hold onto tightly, or it will become simply a mental exercise in religious education, such as Godly Play has become.
• Evolution and Age of the Earth: The academic materials that inspired such level 2 works as the Fettuccia and Blue Unity and History of the Gifts – has NO MENTION of the specific number of years since the birth of the Earth.  Yet originally these CGS materials were made to represent a certain number of years and specifically TAUGHT evolution. I will not get into evolution versus creationism vs something in-between here. I will simply state that it is NOT the place of the atrium to get into this topic either. The atrium’s place is to emphasize that God created the world and provided these gifts without mention of length of time. Let the children’s imaginations, their schools and parents work it out. These modifications were finally made, but only after the Montessori community looked even further down on CGS for even trying to say that a rib on the grosgrain indicates 1,000 years – pure Montessori has no such material, neither should the atrium.
• I have had SO MANY children struggle with the concept of going from a globe to this flat map of Israel, with little to no connection to where we are now (other than on the globe). This is an area that CGS atriums should be introducing a brief preliminary geography material. Starting with the globe, then a round ball of clay, cutting the clay into two (hemispheres) and rolling them flat to show the two halves of the earth on a flat surface; then showing the puzzle map of the world, with Israel and the atrium’s locations marked.
• We have Exercises of Practical Life in the atrium, but so many catechists are NOT focused on the Montessori essentials and they introduce “fluff” into the EPL area, at the same time they ignore what is most essential. Yes, the children need EPL. It fulfills developmental needs that allows the catechist to then get into the theological presentations. HOWEVER, transferring puff balls from one bowl to another is not necessary in the atrium, unless you have the children using tongs to get fresh cotton balls for the polishing work.

The tray on the left should be glass or hard plastic; I was using it elsewhere the day this photo was taken.

• Polishing: I have personally streamlined my AMI album pages on glass, metal and wood polishing, so that ONE presentation can be given and the child now has all the polishing available to work on. The only differences are the actual polishes in the bottles, the type of tray, the ring and the dish for the polish and cotton ball – designed to indicate what that polish is to be used for.
• There are a few ways that the Exercises of Practical Life within the atrium can be freshened up, so as to focus on the essentials, while meeting children’s developmental needs, and leading more fully into the life of the atrium, the family and the church.
• Last EPL thought: consider how the children are to be responsible for the atrium and the church; provide those materials (polishing, flower arranging, cleaning, sweeping, folding cloths (ie for the altar)). Consider what preliminary work they need in order to accomplish those works (eyedropper transfer for polishing, introductory cloth folding, carrying trays and mats). If you need a few more preliminaries at the beginning of the year, fine! Then pull them out by the second month of atrium so the children are not matching colors or transferring puff balls all year when they have other work that more fully meets their developmental needs.
• Language: Some people add far more 3-part and 4-part cards than are entirely necessary. I fully agree with CGS’s current materials manuals in how much they provide, with one exception: it is nice to have the 3-part cards for the cities of Israel for the level 1 children. But I have seen some people go much, much further and label *everything*. It gets to be too much.
• Summary: So in many areas, the Montessori influence is not balanced. Too much or too little and both to the detriment of the potential of the album.

Ok, two things are in bloom!

But it’s ALL so beautiful!

(note to Grandma: please click on each image to see it full-size – the settings here cut down the photos)