The first time I saw a tutorial for DIY microwave popcorn, it really blew my mind. Yes, you actually can tape your own popcorn into a paper lunch bag and pop it, and that will work just fine. The funny thing, though, is that you don't really need the bag at all. You can learn how to make microwave popcorn in a bowl, and save yourself the extra step.
I'm not saying that microwave popcorn is particularly healthy, mind you. I have a microwave, but I try to use it as infrequently as possible just in case it's killing me. I do use it pretty often for popcorn, though, because it's so quick and easy, and popcorn itself is a pretty healthy whole-grain gluten-free snack (even with the butter). Also, kids will eat it, and it's cheap. What's not to love?
How to Make Microwave Popcorn in a Bowl
So, just get a big microwave-safe ceramic or pyrex container, like a casserole or mixing bowl. Put about a quarter cup of popcorn kernels in it and cover with the lid or some kind of plate. Put it in the microwave and set it for five minutes. Listen closely. At first, you'll hear nothing, then occasional pops, then lots of pops. When the pops slow down significantly, start counting after each pop. If you can count about five seconds between pops, turn the microwave off. That's it!
Cooking times for different strains of popcorn (and even the same popcorn when it's sat in your cupboard a while) can vary. If you find that not much has popped after five minutes, you may need to put it in for longer. On the other hand, you may find that you are stopping your popcorn predictably early. Personally I find that five minutes is very close to the perfect time in most cases, and sometimes I just set the timer and forget about it.
Seasoning
I think you can do worse than putting butter on your popcorn. If you don't want to do that, I recommend coconut oil or olive oil. Olive oil has a savory flavor that might take a little getting used to, but I think it's yummy.
If you want to use butter or coconut oil, you can put a tablespoon or so in a teacup or other small dish, and stick it on top of the lid while your popcorn is popping. When you take the popcorn out, stir well while slowly pouring the oil on.
Then you can add dry toppings. With olive oil I really like a combination of nutritional yeast, chili powder and salt. With butter or coconut oil, I might just stick with salt. You can also make or buy cheese powders, which are yummy and definitely beat the nutritional value of most pre-made cheesy snack foods.
Pad Thai is one of my favorite things to cook. It's not something to get into when you only have a few minutes, but it's really not as complicated as you might think. If you can cook, you can make pad thai. This easy pad thai recipe is adapted from one I found on a noodle box, but I'm also going to tell you the secret to making it taste great, which took me years to discover.
Ingredients:
2 T coconut oil
2 or more cloves garlic, minced
8 oz raw chicken, chopped into bite-sized pieces OR 1 lb baked tofu
1 C carrots, thinly sliced
1 C cabbage, thinly sliced
8 oz box flat rice noodles
4 T fish sauce or soy sauce
3 T lime juice
3 T sugar or honey
dash of hot sauce or pinch of red pepper flakes (optional)
2 eggs (optional)
garnishes:
fresh cilantro, chopped
salted roast peanuts, crushed
lime wedges
bean sprouts (optional)
Method:
Put a pot of water on to boil, big enough to cook the noodles in.
Melt coconut oil in a large frying pan and saute garlic over high heat. Add chicken, if using, and cook for a few minutes. (If using baked tofu, wait until later.) Add carrots and cabbage. Stir occasionally and cook everything until the chicken pieces are cooked through. Turn down the heat if anything is burning too much, although I find that getting a bit of singe on the vegetables actually doesn't hurt this dish at all.
While you wait, mix up the sauce. I love that Thai food is usually seasoned with fish sauce rather than soy sauce, because along with the rice noodles that makes the food pretty low in common allergens. If you're vegetarian, though, soy sauce is a fine alternative. Traditional pad thai actually uses tamarind as a sour flavor, but lime is also a Thai flavor, and I don't miss the tamarind at all.
When the vegetables are is almost cooked, put the rice noodles in boiling water. Keep in mind that they only take about four minutes to cook.
Now, here is the secret. Add the sauce to the mixed up stuff now, and let it cook down for a few minutes while the noodles boil. You can save a little to add at the end if you're worried about anything ending up dry, but I really like the way the flavor cooks into the food if you add the sauce ahead of time. Add the baked tofu, too, if using.
Right before you take the noodles out of the water, crack two eggs (if using) into the frying pan and stir them up. Turn the heat off. Drain the noodles and mix them up with everything else. This is a lot of food, so I find that tossing the fried stuff into the noodle pot to mix actually works best.
Serve with plenty of garnishes. They're important! If you want, you can serve them all at the table and let everyone garnish their own plate. This recipe makes two huge restaurant-style portions, but you can definitely get away with feeding more people with moderate appetites.
(Creative Commons image by Flickr user Dan Zen)
I just realized that I haven't posted in over a week, and I think it's because of the weather. Yes, it finally feels like spring here, and I am so excited. One exciting thing I've done is hang up my laundry outside for the first time here.
It is possible that I get too excited about clotheslines. I'm not usually this thrilled to do housework, but there's just something about hanging up laundry... I think it's about half just nice weather, and half nostalgia for all the other sunny days I've spent hanging up laundry.
Or minutes of sunny days, actually, because it really doesn't take that long. Nor does it take any special equipment. If you want to get fancy about it you can set up a pulley system that allows you to hang your laundry while standing in one place, but that's really not necessary. All you need is a bag of clothespins, a rope, and a couple of buildings, trees, or posts.
Clotheslines are a Miracle of Environmental Engineering
Even if you don't love clotheslines as much as I do, it is a really great green idea to use one if they are allowed where you live. I just did some research on the amount of energy it takes to power normal laundry machines, and it's surprisingly high. Apparently the average American household does at least one load of laundry per day, and drying all this laundry uses an amount of power equivalent to driving 3,500 miles over the course of a year. This is also over 5% of the total energy used in most homes. If we could cut out that power usage for even half the year, well, that's a good start at least.
What if you can't use a clothesline? Well, that depends on your situation. If your area forbids it, you might want to check out the Right to Dry campaign and similar activism. Another option is a folding clothes rack, which can store quite small and come out only when you have laundry to dry. (Racks are also useful in any location when the weather is less delightful.)
More Green Laundry Techniques
Besides drying on a rack, there are a couple of other things you can do to make your laundry more eco-friendly. For one thing, you can wash and rinse in cold water. While washers generally use less power than dryers, over 90% of the power they do use is for heating the water. A cold water wash may be slightly less powerful than hot water, but it's still pretty effective in most circumstances. To improve your luck with cold water washing, spot-treat any stains as soon as possible (I just use liquid Dr. Bronner's soap).
In general, powdered laundry detergent is the most ecological choice, because the packaging is more sustainable (cardboard vs. plastic) and also because the manufacturer isn't bottling and shipping you water along with your detergent. Some people have trouble with their powdered detergent not fully dissolving in cold water, though. If you start to find detergent crumbs after switching to cold water, pre-mixing your detergent with a little warm water before adding it to the washer should solve the problem.
If your clothes don't come out as bright as you'd like, consider adding some biodegradable oxygen bleach to the wash (not Oxy-clean, which contains toxic ingredients). For white clothes, you can also "bleach" with lemons if you're really serious about taking your laundry to the next level.
Last year I saw gorgeous pictures of naturally-dyed eggs all over the internet, so this spring I really wanted to try some of my own. The dyes are pretty cheap and simple, and for the most part seem to work surprisingly well. We don't really like to eat cold hard-boiled eggs, though, so one thing I wanted to figure out was how to dye eggs naturally without boiling them, which many of the natural dye recipes recommend. Luckily, that wasn't too hard, either.
Dye Colors
For all of the colors I used a quart of water with two tablespoons of vinegar and a teaspoon of salt. I boiled the water and the ingredients for about half an hour. For yellow, I used a quarter cup of turmeric. For blue, I used a whole chopped purple cabbage. For russet I used the skins and outer layers of four red onions. I also happened to have the juice from a jar of pickled beets, so instead of boiling anything I just used that for purple.
The yellow came out beautifully, and the blue and purple were pretty vibrant, too. Both the yellow and blue would have gotten darker if I had left them to soak longer, but soaking for an hour seemed long enough. By dipping some yellow eggs in blue dye for about a minute, I got a pretty good pale green that didn't come out very well in the picture, but I'm willing to vouch for it. The russet was ok, too, but in the future I wouldn't bother because it was about the same color as the naturally brown eggs we usually buy.
How to Dye Eggs
Prepare your eggs ahead of time. Wash the outsides and hard-boil them if you want, leave them raw to use later, or cut a hole in the bottom of each to drain out the raw egg and make empty shells - do wash inside, too, if using this method.
After boiling the dyes, strain out the vegetable matter and add your eggs or shells right away if possible (the warm dye will not be enough to cook raw eggs). Leave for at least an hour, or overnight for the deepest colors. When you take the eggs out of the dye, gently pat them dry with a rag or paper towel.
Cascarones
Cascarones are colored eggshells stuffed with confetti, to be released when you crack the egg. This Mexican tradition has also inspired a type of natural, candy-filled egg, which is what we made here. I filled my empty eggshells with jellybeans, then glued trimmed mini-muffin cups over the holes as Not Martha recommends. It took me a few minutes to figure out the best gluing method (hint - dry them upside down unless you want your candy to stick to the glue) but in the end they were festive and very, very surprising to my kids, who have been pretending to hide candy-filled eggs ever since.
I've always loved buckwheat pancakes, but I never would have guessed that they were gluten-free. Recently, though, I learned that buckwheat is a completely different plant than wheat. Amazingly, it isn't even a grain at all – it's the seed of a fruit plant. And yes, you can definitely make healthy whole food gluten-free buckwheat pancakes, and they are totally delicious.
So, the next time I went shopping I picked up a bag of buckwheat flour. Now, I should clarify that most buckwheat pancakes you have probably eaten are made with a combination of buckwheat and regular wheat flours, but apparently this isn't necessary. Still, I wanted to add something different to lighten the pancakes up a bit, so I substituted some rice flour for some of the buckwheat in the original recipe. My version turned out great, but I'm sure that 100% buckwheat (if you need to keep it grain-free) would be fine, too.
How to Make Gluten-Free Buckwheat Pancakes:
3/4 C buckwheat flour
1/4 C rice flour
2 T sugar (or equivalent sweetener)
1 T baking powder
1/2 t salt
2 T melted butter or coconut oil
1 egg
3/4 milk or almond milk, or enough to make a wet batter
Mix the dry ingredients. Whisk in the butter or oil, then the egg, then the milk. Don't mix too much; having some lumps left in the batter is fine, and too much mixing can make pancakes tougher (which we really don't need here, because to be honest these pancakes are pretty dense). Melt another tablespoon or so of butter or coconut oil in a frying pan, over medium heat. Pour about 1/4 cup of batter per pancake in the pan, and wait until the edges start to look just a bit dry. Flip and cook on the other side, then remove from heat and serve. If you need to wait to cook more pancakes, storing the done ones on a plate with an upside-down plate on top of it works pretty well.
I do recommend using real maple syrup if you like something sweet with your pancakes. When we made these recently, I heated a cup or so of maple syrup and a pound of frozen cherries over low heat while we were making the pancakes, and that was a perfect accompaniment. Plain yogurt is good with the syrup and berries, too, if you like that sort of thing. There are a million different ways you can top them, though. However you like them, enjoy your buckwheat pancakes!
(Creative Commons image by Lori Ann)
Why Thyroid Health?
A few years ago, I would have thought that an article about iodine and thyroid health sounded incredibly boring. Thyroid health? Why bother?
That's before I realized just how common thyroid problems are, though, and how few people know anything about them. For example, according to some doctors, as many as 1 in 4 women will suffer from hypothyroidism (low thyroid function) at some point during their lives, and many won't even realize it. Hypothyroidism is also common among men, but may manifest differently and be less frequently diagnosed.
Symptoms of Hypothyroidism
Common symptoms of hypothyroidism include fatigue, weight gain, depression, anxiety, feeling cold, abnormal periods (heavy or light), low libido, swelling and puffiness, joint and muscle pain, heart palpitations, hair loss. rashes, brain fog, asthma, digestive problems, UTIs, allergies and migraines...in other words, almost everything that could possibly be wrong with you.
When I first encountered this list, though, I had a pattern of so many of these symptoms that I was sure I was onto something. If you feel the same, what's the next step? Well, the conventional answer would be to go to a doctor and get some thyroid tests. I'm certainly not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. But, there are definitely some issues to consider first.
One is that medical tests are notoriously bad at diagnosing thyroid problems. For one thing, there are a few different relevant hormone levels, and doctors may not test all of them. Also, some thyroid problems can be caused by bad absorption rather than a lack of hormones. Maybe most importantly, there are certain cutoff levels for what is considered hypothyroidism, and many people may be symptomatic even though their deficiencies fall below clinical levels.
Even people who are correctly diagnosed can struggle to find the right treatment. The usual route is prescription of natural or artificial thyroid hormone. This can help in some
cases, but in others it may be hard to find and maintain the right dose. In the best case, the medical model expects most patients to continue taking hormones for the rest of their lives.
While there's a lot to be said for exploring your options, one benefit of formal diagnosis is that you can rule out other potential causes for your symptoms, which may be harder to treat naturally.
Holistic Health Care Options
From a holistic health standpoint, there are actually a lot of things that people can try in response to thyroid problems.
For one thing, Traditional Chinese Medicine has a great track record of treating thyroid problems. Of course, within this system the problem would be diagnosed differently – it might be deficient kidney yang, or something similar. However, medical studies have shown that patients previously diagnosed with hypothyroidism are often helped by these treatments, including acupuncture, herbal medicines and diet.
Speaking of diet, there is a lot you can do here, and this is one of the most accessible types of treatment for many people. Some foods, including broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, soy and peanuts are known as goiterogens and may increase thyroid problems. Unfortunately these are all uniquely nutritious foods, so you may not want to eliminate them completely, Do be aware, though, of whether your symptoms seem to increase after eating them. Soy is a particular problem for many people with thyroid issues.
Autoimmune diets may also be worth considering, since the most common cause of hypothyroidism is Hashimoto's thyroiditis, an autoimmune condition that attacks the thyroid. There are several different types of diets that work to decrease inflammation and the other symptoms of autoimmune dysfunction. I followed the paleo autoimmune plan in this book
for a while, with a significant reduction of my symptoms.
Exercise is also good, especially yoga, which has several poses that stimulate the thyroid specifically. The mind-body connection should not be underestimated, since many thyroid patients report problems with functions of the throat chakra, including expressing their feelings and feeling heard.
If you only try one thing, though, try more rest – lots more. Overexertion can contribute to thyroid problems, and also to adrenal fatigue which is often linked to hypothyroidism.
Iodine Supplementation
One of the most popular and also the most controversial treatments for thyroid problems is iodine supplementation. Iodine is a common, relatively safe mineral, but it has a complicated relationship with the thyroid.
Everyone agrees that the thyroid needs iodine. Iodine deficiency causes goiter, a swollen and inefficient thyroid. The conventional medical viewpoint is that pretty much all Americans
get enough iodine (especially since it's added to table salt) and that adding additional iodine may actually exacerbate thyroid problems.
The other perspective is that while the iodine we get may once have been enough, the body's iodine receptors can also attract toxins that are very common in the modern world, including chrlorine (in bleach and swimming pools), bromine (in most flour, some medicines, and many pesticides), and fluorine (yep, in tap water). These chemicals can impair thyroid function and other processes in the body. So, taking large quantities of iodine may dislodge them and help to flush them out of the body.
This theory makes a lot of sense to me, but is it safe? Well...maybe. Or at least, maybe safer than a lot of the alternatives, since there's nothing safe about having those toxins in your body in the first place.
Studies have been done showing that iodine supplements can cause thyroid swelling in Hashimoto's patients. However, there's some evidence that this happens because the body needs extra selenium to process this amount of iodine, and adding selenium supplements seems to mitigate the swelling. Of course, too much selenium can also be dangerous, so supplementing is definitely a balancing act.
If you do try iodine supplements for hypothyroidism, you are likely to experience detox symptoms at some point. Conventional wisdom is that this is evidence that iodine is causing problems, but I believe that these are usually side effects of bromine leaving the body. Still, supporting supplements should be taken to decrease these side effects, and the level of iodine supplementation should not be too high. I suggest starting low (I started with 2.5 mg, which is one drop of Lugol's 2% solution
daily, but you could go even lower by diluting it) and increasing your dose very gradually, especially if you have a lot of detox symptoms.
I feel like I should repeat that this isn't medical advice, but it's worked well for me so far. While at times I've found the iodine protocol expensive, slow, difficult to stick with and hard to guess the best doses, I've always come back to it because it just works. Most people who like this protocol report significant improvements within three months, especially at higher iodine doses between 12.5mg (one Iodoral pill
) and 50mg per day.
I've been eating mostly grain-free recently, and I've also been kind of bummed about baking. This is not a coincidence. The recipes I've tried with nut flours have been pretty disappointing, and while the bean-based cupcakes were really interesting and pretty good, I have to admit that they weren't exactly cake.
Then I remembered flourless chocolate cake. It's a regular dessert that people eat, even if they don't have to! That seemed like a good sign. Anyway, I adapted this recipe from one that I found online, and it was totally delicious if a bit on the not-so-sweet side. Actually, it's pretty far on the not-so-sweet side, (but like a very dark chocolate, not like a too-healthy dessert). I served mine with strawberries, though, and I think that was a good decision.
Anyway, here's the cake.
Ingredients
4 oz unsweetened baking chocolate
3 eggs
3/4 C honey
1 stick of butter or 1/2 C coconut oil
1/4 C cocoa powder
1 t vanilla extract
1/4 t salt
Method
Technically you are supposed to melt chocolate in a double boiler. This allows it to melt more slowly at a lower temperature, and can avoid problems with texture and so on. I think I would do this if I were making chocolate candies, but for this cake I just melted my chocolate in a pan, and I had no complaints about the results. Anyway, melt chocolate and butter or oil over low heat.
Grease an 8" round pan (springform if you have it) while you wait. When the mixture is melted, turn off the heat and mix in the honey, cocoa powder and salt. Crack the eggs in a separate bowl and mix them up. Drizzle the eggs into the batter slowly, mixing constantly to make sure they don't congeal in a lump from the heat. Add the vanilla and pour the batter into the pan. Bake at 375 degrees for about 25 minutes or until the cake is slightly firm to the touch.
Variation and Inspiration
If you want your cake a bit sweeter and don't mind the refined sugar, you can use regular dark chocolate instead of baking chocolate.
My cake was adapted from a recipe by the Detoxinista, who adapted it from elsewhere and so on. I appreciate the inspiration, though, so if you like this cake check out her flourless chocolate cake for two recipe - it's a bit different, but I bet it's also delicious.
(Creative Commons image by Peter Pearson)
I haven't always been a fan of hot peppers. I never ate much spicy food at all growing up, and although my tolerance has grown slightly as an adult, I started out using hot sauce on my food, or maybe crushed pepper flakes in my recipes.
In my mission to cook healthy whole foods, though, I've finally learned how to use hot peppers. I've actually come to love fresh chilis in a lot of the food I cook – as long as they're red chilis.
Types of Chili
One thing to keep in mind about chili peppers is that they are not all created equal. Some are barely spicier than a bell pepper, while others are practically inedible in their pure form.
For most applications, I think jalapeños are a good entry-level whole pepper. They have some serious bite, but they're not as ferociously hot as I used to think they were before I started to experiment. Like many peppers, jalapeños come in different colors, especially red and green. Personally, I have a strong preference for red. Green chilis are ok, but they have a little of that unique green pepper flavor that bell peppers also have, and that is a flavor that I've never really been able to appreciate.
Cooking with Hot Peppers
The most common way to use fresh hot peppers is to mince them and add them to a dish in the early stages, for example to saute them along with onion or garlic. The only problem here is that it's hard to know exactly how spicy the dish is going to end up, since you can't exactly taste it at this point. I suggest starting with just a bit and adding more to your next dish until you get an idea of how much chili you like in your food. During this process, I strongly suggest sticking with the same pepper.
When you mince hot peppers, keep in mind that a lot of the heat is in the seeds. In most cases, you actually want to scrape out the seeds and throw them away. Just mince the flesh of the pepper, and don't forget to wash your hands, knife and cutting board well before you touch your eyes or chop anything that you don't want to have a peppery flavor.
Preserving Peppers
Fresh peppers can be yummy, but actually my favorite ways to use them are in simple preserves. Simplest of all, you can take some fresh chilis (remove the seeds and stems) and puree them in a blender with vinegar. This makes a very simple hot sauce that might not be the tastiest condiment, but is great for adding to food while cooking. The handy thing about using a vinegar like this is that since the peppers are thoroughly blended, you can add it in the final stages of cooking and taste as you go for the perfect level of heat. A very spicy pepper – for example a habanero – works well here, because you can get a lot of spice without having to add a lot of vinegar to your dish.
If you actually like to eat hot peppers, you can also make your own pickled peppers (which are more accurately called vinegared peppers, since this recipe isn't fermented). Make thin slices of some jalapeños or a milder chili, like banana pepper. Put them in a jar and cover with vinegar. Leave as long as possible, but even a few hours in the vinegar will give them a mild pickled flavor. Over time, the vinegar will also get peppery, and can be used to flavor dishes like the pureed version. Put on sandwiches, salads, or wherever you could use a little extra heat.
I've always loved the taro dishes I've tried at Chinese restaurants, but I had never thought about cooking any myself until recently. I've been on a grain-free diet, though, which also rules out potatoes but not yams, and technically taro is a yam. I am feeling pretty starch-deprived, so this seemed like a great opportunity to expand my whole food cooking skills.
If you haven't tried it, taro is kind of like a cross between a potato and a yam. Specifically, it has the texture and a bit of the flavor of yam, but is also pretty bland and barely sweet at all.
I got four taro roots, which were each a little smaller than my fist. They have a pretty serious peel, so the first thing you have to do in most cases is take it off, which is pretty easy with a vegetable peeler. Then you can treat the roots pretty much like you would any sweet potato. I cut mine in eights and steamed them until I could cut through them easily with a fork (about twenty minutes).
You can serve taro in lots of different ways, including in soups and stews, as long as there is some kind of broth or sauce that adds a lot of flavor. All the taro dishes I've loved have been some variation of a fried paste, though, so that's what I wanted to try. I mashed my roots with a tablespoon each of coconut oil and honey, but I'm not sure that was necessary.
You know how when you mash potatoes you're not supposed to overdo the mashing so that they don't get too gluey? With mashed taro, you actually want to develop the sticky consistency by mashing for a long time, beating in a mixer, or even kneading the mash for a few minutes – that's what I did, and it was surprisingly dough-like even with the oil and honey.
I enlisted my husband to do the actual frying because he's pretty good at that. He flattened the paste into pancake shapes and pan-fried them in a little more coconut oil until they were crispy on both sides (but still soft inside). They didn't seem to hold together quite as well as restaurant taro patties, but they were still really tasty with a stir-fry. I'd be perfectly happy to eat them again as they were, but I will also be tempted to add an egg next time, for texture.
(creative commons image by Flickr user conbon33)
I love to cook whole food from scratch, so I'm not sure why I put off learning how to make homemade yogurt for so many years. I think it may have been the fact that there is something called a "yogurt maker," and I have never had one. I have something better, though, that helps me make my own yogurt and a lot of other foods, too: a crockpot, aka slow cooker.
DIY Yogurt
There's nothing wrong with organic yogurt from the store. I really like greek yogurt, personally. If the process were harder, I might ask myself why I should make yogurt from scratch. The fact is, though, that it's incredibly easy. A more relevant question is, why wouldn't I make my own yogurt?
One benefit of making your own, besides the inherent coolness of having your own countertop culture-farm, is that you can use any milk you want. I like being able to make mine out of local, organic whole milk (it can be especially hard to find full-fat yogurt in stores). Also, you can buy milk in a cardboard carton instead of a huge plastic yogurt tub, which I feel better about. If you're lucky, you can even get milk in reusable glass bottles, or maybe even find fresh raw milk, which would be awesome.
I haven't made yogurt with non-dairy milks, myself, although theoretically most of the process is the same.
The Crockpot Method
You are not going to believe how simple this is. Wash your crockpot and add a quart of milk. Turn it on to low (not warm), and leave for three hours. Turn it off and leave for three more hours. Stir in a packet of yogurt starter (easy to find in most health food stores or online). Wrap a towel around the crockpot and leave it alone for at least six hours or overnight. Sometimes I leave mine quite a bit longer than that.
If you have your own homemade yogurt or other yogurt with live cultures, you can add half a cup of yogurt instead of powdered starter. (This part of the process doesn't work with soymilk, though, since it isn't as great of a food for the culture as milk and can't keep it alive for as long.) If you make a quart or two of yogurt per week, you should be able to keep this process going indefinitely.
Drawbacks
This homemade yogurt is pretty thin. Also, it's not appropriate for the GAPS diet or the lactose-intolerant, since it hasn't been cultured for long enough to transform all of the lactose in the milk. Culturing for a longer time would probably help with both problems, but it's difficult with the crockpot process, since if you actually turn the crockpot on during culturing, the yogurt can easily get overheated and ruined – which, by the way, is what has happened if you ever get extra lumpy yogurt with lots of clear whey.
Apparently it used to be possible to culture yogurt in some crockpots set to warm, but unfortunately there are now laws regulating a lowest temperature high enough to kill bacteria, which is, yeah, not so great for yogurt bacteria. While my first thought when I learned that was to go out and try to buy an old crockpot, unfortunately that's not such a great idea either, because some of them are glazed with lead glazes. So.
Thickening
I'm trying to hack my crockpot to create a consistently lower temperature for longer culturing, but that's very much a work in progress. In the meantime, there are a couple of other things you can do to thicken your homemade yogurt. For one thing, you can continue culturing for a longer time by setting your yogurt in a warm place after the first six hours.
You can also strain it using cheesecloth or other food-grade fabric. Depending on the degree of straining you can just create a thicker yogurt, a greek yogurt (which is only strained regular yogurt) or even a thick yogurt cheese. Flavored with some honey or salt and herbs, you can use this yogurt cheese in many dishes where you might use cream cheese.
I love to cook whole food from scratch, so I'm not sure why I put off learning how to make homemade yogurt for so many years. I think it may have been the fact that there is something called a "yogurt maker," and I have never had one. I have something better, though, that helps me make my own yogurt and a lot of other foods, too: a crockpot, aka slow cooker.