Mid-Week Update

On Monday, we headed down the Parks Hwy towards Nenana to the Big M Farm at mile 314.5. They have u-pick berries and vegetables. While we were on our road trip, they would be posting these wonderful pictures of ripe berries starting around late June. We picked some golden raspberries, carrots, cucumbers, yellow beets, green beans, tomatoes and peas.

Yesterday, I made yogurt in the Instant Pot trying out its "yogurt" cooking program. I put 4 pint canning jars on a trivet inside of the pot, added some water and steamed the jars to sterilize them and the inside of the Instant Pot. I then added 1⅓ cup of whole milk to each jar. The initial part of the "yogurt" program is to bring the milk up to 180°F to pasteurize the milk. But since I was using the canning jars, I just used the saute function and had a thermometer in one of the jars. After reaching temperature, I moved the jars into a water bath to cool them down. When the temperature of the milk was down to 100°F, I added 1Tbsp of sugar and 1Tbsp of plain yogurt with an active culture to each jar. Stirred it up and added some of the golden raspberries to each jar. The jars were placed back in the Instant Pot on a trivet with about 1½ cups of water in the pot. Select the "yogurt" function and increased the time to 12 hours. In the morning, I put the jars in the refrigerator to thicken up. The yogurt is very tasty. Pretty tart as a result of 12 hours of cooking. (Normal is 8 hours and mild is 6 hours)

According to the recipe, if you then drained the whey from the yogurt by using something like cheesecloth or a coffee filter, then the resulting yogurt would be "greek style". You learn something new every day. I didn't know that was the only difference between regular and greek yogurt.

Today (Wednesday), I drove down to Delta to pick up the transmission parts ordered from Ural. Muriel gave me one of the limited edition Urals of Alaska patches. It'll look good on the RoadCrafter once it gets back from the Aerostitch repair shop. Muriel said that they had made up some stickers but didn't have any at the shop. Mickey also gave me some parts to drop off to RickS in Fairbanks the next time I saw him. RickS was the one that I had purchased the Ural from. Since he no longer has his shop in town, I rarely see him so I just ran out to his place and dropped off the parts.

Here is what I had ordered. On the left is the 3rd/4th shift fork, on top is the 3rd/4th slide, and on the bottom is 3rd gear itself. I need to pick up a different external snap ring tool as the transmission uses a different style of snap rings. I asked Mickey if there was anything I should do when assembling the transmission and he said to just oil the needle and ball bearings.

I should be able to get the rig back on the road before the weekend.