Happy Friday, y'all! Shabbat Shalom!

Looks like the Baptist school up the road's about to get some unwanted bad publicity.

On Thursday morning a former Wake Forest student will appear on NBC’s The Today Show to talk about an alleged sexual assault. According to the Wake Forest fan blog Blogger So Dear, the student will claim that she was raped by two members of the Wake Forest basketball team in 2009. The alleged incident occurred in Miami, Florida the night before the basketball team was set to play Cleveland State in the in the first round of the 2009 NCAA Tournament. They lost to Cleveland State, 84-69.

This is an extremely serious accusation, and the fact that this young woman is going on national television to tell her story is huge. But there are two sides to every story and hopefully everyone has learned from the whole Duke Lacrosse case not to rush to judgement (sic), and no player has been named. However, if this turns out to be true….we will just have to wait and see what happens.

That team started off 16-0 and was ranked number one at one point during the year before collapsing at the end of the season. Dino Gaudio was fired as head coach a year later.

Every parent's nightmare!

Side note: If Gaudio's firing had anything to do with this, I can only say, "Take a hint, UNx (and Butch Davis)."

Sobering Thought in Trying Times

“Battle not with monsters lest you become one.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The Best Things In Life ...

Self-Reliance and Back to Basics

Lately I've been pondering over and reading some seriously disturbing articles on the ever-rising price of oil, our dependency on fossil fuels, the shrinking quality of raw foods, and the changing display of available foodstuffs in the grocery store. Two things have especially caught my eye today: Breyers has ceased production of yogurt (gasp!) and there was only 1 flavor of Dannon Yogurt on the shelf - coffee. Now, I heart coffee like many people do, especially Kona coffee which as we all know IS the true nectar of humanity. But coffee yogurt? To me that's like turnip cake, or string bean jello. I'm sure there are some people who thrive on it, but for the rest of us, that's just NOT right.

Anyway, so I did a lil net surfin' and what do I find? Why, you can make yogurt at home in your very own crockpot! Who knew?? The first place I found this was on The Simple Dollar - a blog I follow where I get lots of "do it yourself" advice. This led me to the instructions on A Year of Slow Cooking where there was a bit more detail (to satisfy the overly-analytical side of me). Then I found this totally awesome video on YouTube!



I'm almost to the 2 and 1/2 hour mark in the instructions. I'm going to follow the original recipe using only whole milk and 1/2 cup of starter (plain) yogurt - I'll be leaving off the powdered milk for this batch. We'll see how it ends up later tonight!

Update at 8pm: Peeked at the crockpot - smells like yogurt!!

Update at 11pm: It worked! It isn't as thick as store-bought full-fat yogurt but the taste is MUCH smoother and it's most definitely yogurt! I didn't even cringe at the taste of warm yogurt. It's yummy! It made enough yogurt to fill 2 large yogurt cups and another container. In the morning I'll check to see if it thickened more in the fridge overnight. Best part: WAY cheaper than store bought and NO additives or preservatives. I'm psyched!
Next batch I think I will try adding the powdered milk.