Yogurt

The other day I went to a fancy pants store that sells fancy pants cheese and I thought "Oh yum, I will treat myself to a fancy cheese!" But then I saw the prices and decided I didn't need the calories anyway. But I did get inspired to make my own cheese! I immediately called up a friend who had said she was going to make cheese, but as it turns out she never did. She did, however, buy a book. Which is a step farther than I had gotten, so I was able to borrow her book, Home Cheese Making.
To be honest, I haven't actually looked at the book yet. Because then I found this website and it said to start by making yogurt, and gave step-by-step instructions how to do that. So today, that's what we did! It's been a rainy, cold day, and so I'm disinclined to do my outside chores and my inside chores were done yesterday (What an idiot! It was not raining yesterday!) so it's a perfect day for some food-making projects.
I HATE the way the website's instructions are set up, the guy could seriously use a good graphic designer to make the instructions more clear to follow (wink, nudge) but I think it's probably the best place online for these instructions nonetheless. I think I'd be more successful if I re-wrote them in a format that makes more sense to me. A mistake was made, but it wasn't fatal.
See, first you bring milk to 185 degrees.

And then, you let it cool to 130 (we put it in a sink of cool water, and pour in your starter culture. Basically, through no one's fault but my own (well, probably Nitro's fault since he said "You don't need to make a slurry, just pour in the starter!") I poured in my starter when the heated milk was still 185 degrees, and it should have cooled to 130, THEN added the starter.

So I think we killed our culture upon impact. Fortunately for me, I had another tub of plain yogurt in the fridge to put in there ... so we waited until the milk was at 130, and added more culture. Hopefully that was an okay thing to do. Maybe not. The milk did begin to clump up (you can see that in the picture) and I'm not sure if that is what it was supposed to do or not. I'm guessing yes, but maybe not, since it was so hot. We shall see! We have to let the stuff incubate for 3 hours before knowing for sure if it worked.
Right now, it's sitting in the ice chest, incubating.