homemade yogurt help, please

First disclosure: I don't have a yogurt maker and I am not familiar with your yogurt model. I made yogurt on stove top in a pot. I am going to list the steps of making yogurt on stove top and perhaps by looking at each step, you can figure out why your yogurt didn't solidify. When you make yogurt on stove top, you need to heat the milk to a proper temp to kill unwanted bacteria, then cool the milk down to proper temp before introducing the culture, if the milk is too hot when the culture is added, the good bacteria will be killed. Then the milk w/ culture sit in the warm bath until solidify. All utensils, pots, containers that come in contact with milk and culture have to be absolutely clean. The culture has to be live as you know. Since you have a yogurt maker, I assume that the machine will take care of heating up the milk to the proper temp and cooling it down to a proper temp. Can your machine's temperature sensor broke and therefore, didn't heat the milk properly or cool the milk properly? Since you've tried different cultures so we can rule out the cultures not being live out. I didn't think that you'll need to warm the yogurt manually (after introducing the culture) to solidify it, that's what the machine is for. However, if you feel that is necessary, try placing the yogurt on top of the fridge, near a heating board, in the warmest room of your flat, warm up some water in a largest pot you have and put the yogurt containers in there. Even if you don't have an electric blanket, wrap them in a non-electric blanket may help. Those heat pad that people used warm sore muscles can also help. Good luck

stjamesb1 in Home Cooking

I bought a Vietnamese coffee filter...any tips for its use? [moved from General Chowhounding Topics]

Place few teaspoons of the ground coffee into the pot. Place the centre post piece (the piece consists of the centre post and the perforated plate) into the pot, twist slightly to tighten up. Pour hot water to the top of the pot. Adjust the centre post to adjust the rate of the drip. It should be very slow drip. Place the cover over the pot while the coffee drip. The cover can be used to hold the pot once the dripping is all done. You will have to experiment to see the strength of the coffee to the number of teapsoons of coffee to add to the pot. Typically this type of coffee is enjoyed with condensed milk or just black and/or ice. Hope this is clearer than other instructions you have received.

stjamesb1 in Home Cooking

"Sharing Fee" Told Afterwards

As someone who have worked in the industry before, I can understand why the waiter had formed certain opinions of your party, especially if you were sharing with a 9 yr old and asked for bread twice. May be the sharing fee is at the discretion of the wait staff and he exercises this whenever he sees fit, granted that this fee should be been more prominently advertised. Incidentally, we almost always ordered an appertizer seperately for our 3 yrs old. Often, an appertizer is less than or same as the sharing fee. I supposed that you could have spoken up to the management about the sharing fee and they may or may not take it off for you, but either way, you are not going back there any way, right?

stjamesb1 in Not About Food

Thoughts on King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking cookbook?

I have this book and used number of their recipes. The chocolate genois cake worked great without any tweaking. I baked about 5-7 bread recipes. The bread recipes were hit and miss for me. Some of the bread recipes needed tweaking. The only cookies recipe I tried was peanut butter, chocolate chip cookies and they were ok. Need some more tweaking. We mostly eat whole wheat in our family so it is not that we are not used to how whole wheat tasted.

stjamesb1 in Home Cooking

Family dinning near China town

This is an update on our outing to Ly Michael this past Christmas. We are a group of 20 people, including toddlers and children. We got the room in the back which was perfect for our group. With toddlers, regardless of how well behaved they normally are, long meals bored them. With our own room, they ran around and didn't bother any other patrons. Our waiters even joined into the fun with the kids. We went with the family style menu. The food was tasty and there were lots of it. I kept on telling everyone to pace themselves because there will be lots of food. The staff was more than accomodating. They worked with us to come up with something that satisfied everyone, including a vegetarian, another person with seafood allergy, kids and not-so adventurous eaters. Even for those of us who were looking for something little bit different, the food didn't disappointed. Their location was perfect for us since we stayed at Hilton.
All in all, everyone was very pleased.

stjamesb1 in Pennsylvania

Vegetarian Pho in Philadelphia

Vientiane ? I supposed that is Laos's ? and it has red or yellow curry? You are right, doesn't sound very traditional. I will think I will pass on that one.

Although, I will have to try Ong's to see.
But if one has to stay vegetarians that some Pho is better than nothing. I am supposed to be vegetarian on doctor's order so this is good news indeed.

stjamesb1 in Pennsylvania

Family dinning near China town

We checked out Ly Michael. The food are good and the service are very nice. The room in the back is just what we are looking for.
L'angolo is not quite what we are looking for. We also peeked in at Cucina Forte and not quite the right place either. So we are going to propose to the group about Ly Michael and see what everyone say. We hope that it will pass muster with the kids.

On a side note, tonight we went to Erawan. The food there are good, although it was more expensive than we thought it would be. Don't get us wrong, the food is good it just that when we checked the menu on a web site, the price point were lower, must be old menus.

stjamesb1 in Pennsylvania

Vegetarian Pho in Philadelphia

joyprivate,
That's why I expressed doubt that vegetarian pho really exist. Specifically, I doubt that a big pho place actually make vegetarian stock seperate from the beef stock. Just so you know, even chicken pho is still mostly beef stock with chicken meat on top.

stjamesb1 in Pennsylvania

Vegetarian Pho in Philadelphia

I hate to bust anyone bubble. But being Vietnamese myself, I do wonder if they make the broth vegetarian.

stjamesb1 in Pennsylvania

Family dinning near China town

ok, after some searching, here is my short list
in the order of distance from Chinatown. Any comments would be much appreciated. I am looking for some place for a group of 20 people as mentioned above.

Thank you.

Ly Michael's
Radicchio Cafe
Ava
Cucina Forte
Audrey Claire
Valentino
Branzino
L'Angolo
August

stjamesb1 in Pennsylvania