A lot of my money saving tips revolve around food. Why? Because it is one of the few areas where you have control. You can very rarely cut your housing costs or cost of insurance etc. but you can easily save a ton of money when it comes to grocery shopping. I recently decided to review our grocery spending habits and see if there was anything we were spending too much on. I kept reciepts from shopping trips for about a month and looked them over. I was appalled to see how much we spent a month on yogurt! It was a very large portion of our grocery bill. Yogurt is good for you, and since my son is not a huge meat eater it is one of those things I know he will eat that provides a fair amount of protein, so I didn’t want to just cut it out of our diet. I went looking for instructions on how to make it on your own, and after 1 failed attempt I found a recipe that works great and tastes incredible. It costs about .20 cents per 8 ounces to make versus the average $1.50 on 5 ounces of Greek Yogurt. It is also super easy!

Ingredients:

8 Cups Skim Milk (I did skim because I wanted it to be lower fat, but you can use any type of milk you would like)

4 ounces plain greek yogurt (this is your culture starter. Once you have made a batch of yogurt you can use 4 ounces from your previous batch)

1/2 Cup honey or sugar if I use sugar I end up putting in around 3/4 cups

3 tablespoons vanilla (optional, you can leave it out for plain yogurt, but we love vanilla for adding fruit)

Step 1: Pour the milk into a slow cooker and turn it on low for 2.5 hours.

Step 2: Turn off the slow cooker and unplug it. Leave the lid on and the milk inside for 3 hours.

Step 3: Add the yogurt, honey and vanilla and whisk together.

Step 4: Cover the crock pot with a towel to keep it warm and let it sit overnight.

Step 5: Line a strainer with coffee filters and place it in a bowl. Spoon the yogurt from the slow cooker into the strainer and put it in the fridge. The whey will strain out of the yogurt while it cools and create nice thick yummy Greek yogurt.

Step 6: Put yogurt into containers. It can also be frozen and thawed to eat later.

That’s it! We love it with chopped up strawberries, pomegranates or crushed frozen raspberries.