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Neat!!!

Make yogurt cheese with your excess yogurt: put in cheesecloth, hang overnight to drain. Voila!

I keep meaning to try this in a small batch, so I don't end up with an elderly half-tub of ricotta in the fridge. Is the fresh homemade stuff just fantastically good, rhapsodie? I used to buy nice ricotta at a local Italian market, but I moved too far to walk over on a whim. Now I'll be daydreaming about your ricotta. Mmmm.

As for your bonus yogurt question, making yogurt cheese is a great suggestion. My super-easy method, much more convenient than the seive-cheesecloth-weight arrangement I used to use: save your yogurt tubs and puncture the bottom of one liberally with a skewer. Put the punctured one inside an unpunctured one and use this as your strainer. It's compact enough to refrigerate easily, which means you can drain it for a long time even if your kitchen is too warm for it to keep well. You can either seal it with the lid or put yet another yogurt tub on top and fill that with water, for a weight.

I use yogurt cheese the way you'd use cream cheese, or I mix in herbs and oil and garlic to make faux-boursin.

You can also use (not-drained) yogurt in quick breads that call for buttermilk. I haven't perfectly refined the chemistry yet, but it works pretty well: for each cup of buttermilk, I use around 2/3 cup of yogurt diluted with 1/3 cup water.

This recipe made maybe a cup and a half of ricotta. But it's so, so good and fresh. You never realize how processed the stuff you buy at the store really is until you try a recipe like this.

I'll have to try hanging the yogurt this weekend, thanks for the suggestion!

I loved the single serving sorbet/ice-cream tutorial with the cute teddy-bear. There was a link on the page that Elsa linked to.

Didn't gomichild do this with just whole milk and fresh lemon juice? Either way, i'm going to try it one of these days. I love ricotta cheese.