Tart Frozen Yogurt

Oh, frozen yogurt.  Yum.  While I'm usually not a "scooped" ice cream kind of girl, I do love soft serve.  I  think it's nostalgic really...childhood summers and Dairy Queen. It goes with the fireflies and summers in Iowa nostalgia I suppose--I still swear that DQ has the best Ice Milk product out there.  Frozen yogurt is right up there on my soft serve love list-- a love like this could get a bit spendy.  While it doesn't really sound too bad at $.44 an ounce, it would be comparable to paying over $2.50 for each of those individual 6oz yogurts at the grocery store.  Crazy.  

I've made froyo before, but I usually add in fruit or chocolate or other goodies.  In that form, it kind of becomes similar to ice cream.  Tasty, but it just sits in my freezer.  I wanted something clean and tart and just like the kind I grab at the local froyo shops.   I'm a bit embarrassed to see that making it at home is about as easy as it comes.  The only thing missing is that slightly grainy texture(which I love) that the shops have.  That aside, this is pretty comparably tasty and the ingredient "list" is hardly a list at all...yogurt, sugar and vanilla. 

I used one 2 lb tub of whole milk yogurt drained overnight.  Once drained, about this much yogurt remains...

Mix in 1/2 cup sugar (or more per your taste preference) and a tsp vanilla.  Pop it into your ice cream maker for 15-20 mins...

As you can see, I wrote down this very complicated recipe just in case I needed it for the blog post and forgot...



And then magically you have this. 

While it looks like a solid mass here, it's actually the perfect soft serve consistency--you can freeze it up for a bit if you like a firmer yogurt.  I topped it with some fresh strawberries with a tsp of sugar mixed in and I swear, this was better than any ice cream sundae.  When you think about it, these are the same ingredients in your everyday individual yogurt cups, but when deconstructed and frozen, it's like eating a soft serve sundae.  I love that.  I do have to say that the whole milk yogurt though makes for a super creamy, almost ice cream like, frozen yogurt. It was almost a bit too rich for me so I actually have some lowfat yogurt draining away for my next batch. 

On another front, finally, after a whole lot of this...

I have this. I'm actually in shock at how quickly a quilt can be put together.  It's all relative I know, but when knitting or crocheting an afghan takes months or up to a year, a few hours over a couple of weekends seems like nothing. Next weekend I'll attempt the quilting.  I first learned to quilt from a friend who swore that hand quilting was the only way to make a quilt and so I always feel a bit of trepidation right before machine quilting.  Okay, that's a lie.  I feel an immense amount of trepidation and fear before machine quilting since I've puckered many a quilt. It's all about the layering and pinning technique right?  Wish me luck. :)