More skills in abundance

This is the first post of 2012.  Yesterday, being the first day of 2012, was both a Sunday and a Holiday.  It was ever so hot - that dry breathless air that seems to almost suck the air out of one's lungs.

Helen, one of my kitchen goddess mentors, had lent me a flask in which to make yoghurt.  So yesterday was my first attempt.  I made the first batch and let it mature for the day, and then tasted it.  It has to be the best yoghurt I have ever tasted - more like cream, really, than yoghurt - and low fat, to boot!  It was so yummy that I landed up having breakfast cereal with yoghurt for supper.  And I made my second batch:

I have the ability to make .5 litres at a time, given my current flask capacity.  The above was .5 litres of milk, some fat free powdered milk and a maximum of 15 minutes in the kitchen.  It is worth every moment, I promise you.

I also made some jammies:

Tucked underneath the desiccated coconut is the strawberry jam that I made last season.  They turned out really nicely. 

I was planning to go walking with the Flat Earth people today.  It is overcast and rainy enough to dissuade me from that.  Instead, I will continue to grow my kitchen goddess with the following:

On the left are the last of the cherries that we picked a fortnight ago.  They steeped in sugar over night in the fridge.  In the middle are sunflower seeds, soaking in a light brine, which I will roast for forthcoming salads.  On the right is a tub of gooseberries that also steeped in sugar overnight.  Today will be my first shot at bottling berries, which will hopefully retain some meausre of 'wholeness', and roasting seeds.

And last, but by no means least, I stumbled across this, care if Dipyo:

In my current journey through life, where I am emerging from a crossroads of note, I have spent some time dwelling on the masks that we wear.  Masks are always sourced in self esteem issues, otherwise why would we bother to wear them?  The physical side of masks are easy to quantify:  clothes and jewellery for our physical bodies; make-up and cosmetics for our faces; debt in order to buy the up-market house and fancy car that we can't actually afford.  What is of much more interest to me is the psychological masks that we wear:  pretending that we don't care, when actually we do - sourced in the fear of rejection, perhaps; pretending that we do care, when actually we don't - sourced in the codependence of wanting to be 'liked' by others, maybe;  aggression - sourced so often in our inner pain that we don't even begin to understand; and so, so many more.  I have two new year resolutions arising out of the above:

1)  I am going to try to live authentically, deviating from this only where I might offend others in the process;

2)  Try to remember that everyone around me is just like me.  Every single one of them is more than what I see.