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Labneh, but not as it might be known…

I made labneh without knowing the name for it about 40 years ago.  I had access to yogurt that was at/beyond expiry dates.  So I did try hanging some of it in cheesecloth to drain.  I don’t remember being all that impressed with it, but it was an interesting approach.

And now, years later, I find it is related down that line from yogurts to such as Greek yogurt (a drained product) and then more directly to labneh.  Labneh – real labneh – would be made with probably cow’s milk yogurt, hung for a few hours to drain.  Incredibly easy to make…

Well, for whatever various reasons, what I make is off-recipe, I guess.  I got a cheap yogurt maker a few weeks back at the Salvation Army.  Works fine – no thermostat, but what seems a pretty consistent heat.

The batch today is from soy milk.  Just off the shelf.  I did add a blob of coconut cream into this yogurt, but can’t say I can taste it.  I use a couple of blobs of a commercial coconut cream probiotic yogurt.  I haven’t tried any cow’s milk, but I think for the most part they rely on same/similar bacteria.

I let it set for 8 hours – overnight.  I put the finished product into the fridge for a few hours.  Sometimes it can still be a bit runny if it is warm, just out of the maker – best to let it cool completely.

Sometimes the yogurt will be pretty much ‘set’ – but still seems to be too creamy and smooth and loses the ‘yog’.  I just runs down like cream through the cloth.  Today’s was somewhat like that.  I first tried pouring into two layers of cheesecloth.  Too open – ran through too readily.  So I used a piece of Metric Fat Flat.  Cotton, apparently made for quilters?  But a slightly open weave – and it drained the yogurt just fine.

Then, after a couple of hours of hanging, I put it into the tofu press – and this time, it will be a full sized block, not like the thin thing I made last time!

I’m not going to press it quite as heavy as I did the last time, but may increase it depending on how much liquid comes out.  It still has quite a bit of liquid to drain, I think…

 

 

 

Sidetracked: I made a kite ferry…

Looking up the kite line. The release mechanism is at the lower left. The two strings attach to the sail – and when they are released (when the ferry gets to the stopper), the sail flaps loosely, allowing the ferry to come back down the line. Maybe too fast, but we’ll see…

I’ve put the silver flowform aside, as my initial sewing was pretty abysmal.  I think I’ve got the tension, etc, right now…

So yesterday and today I used what scraps of materials I could find to make a kite ferry…

I think about dropping things from kites (an admirable pastime!) in three categories.

  • A simple dropper. Elastic/rubber creates the tension – when you jerk on the line, the two pieces separate, allowing the ring to drop away. But then you have to pull it in again if you want to drop something else…

    A simple dropper.  The ‘payload’ is attached to the kite line and raised up into the sky.  It is dropped by some (unspecified) mechanism.  Kenny Noble and I tried to perfect a knot that could tie a plastic parachute to the kite line, and then release it with a series of tugs.  Not always successful, and really at the bottom of the hierarchy in my mind!  I’ve made one device that uses rubber bands as resistance, allowing it (sometimes) to drop the payload when it is pulled – but it is pretty fine tuning to keep it from extending and prematurely dropping.

  • Next would be a kite messenger.  In this case, the device (along with the payload) runs up the kite line on its own.  When it hits a ‘stopper’ on the line, it releases the payload.  But the messenger doesn’t have any way of coming back down the line.
  • The release area. When the front of the ferry hits the stopper, it pushed a fibreglass rod back through the main rod. And the items held by that rod drop away. And one of them holds the lines that hold the wing against the wind . And it can then slide back down the line.

    Then comes the pinnacle, in my opinion – the kite ferry.  This is a device that will climb the kite line, hit a stopper, drop its payload – but then change configuration so it can slide back down the line.  Though I’m dropping various junk, the longer term plan is to use this device to drop fishing hooks – allowing Averil to ‘cast’ her fishing line much further out than she would otherwise be able.

This is the second substantial messenger I have made.  The first was over-built, but did sometimes, periodically, occasionally work.  I’ve not persevered with it over the last year much.

Last thing to do is to work out an effective stopper – maybe a polystyrene ball?  I have had mixed results making the ‘disk’ type stopper.  They have worked, but I’m hoping for something more workable.

And my final design feature relates to my wanting to be able to break the device apart, roll it up and carry it easily.  I think this one might be a winner, eventually.

Plans for the blue parafoil…

1982 Edition 3

This .pdf parafoil kite plan is from https://www.kiteplans.org/planos/parafoil4/parafoil4.html,  but I have used Google Translate.  As you can see, it is about 35 years old, but I liked the approach by the author.  It isn’t a plan to tell you how to make it – it just concentrates on quality calculations to create the patterns.

I didn’t use this so much as a ‘plan’ as for the shape of the aerofoil and fins.  I relied on an element of trust when it came to some of the maths…