I woke up excited this Friday. Before I even made coffee I went straight to the living room, where a jar of homemade yogurt had been sitting snug under a pile of blankets all night. I lifted the corner of the blanket like it was Christmas morning — and it had worked. My first ever homemade yogurt, set and ready.

It still needs refining. I used the cheapest, most basic milk I had on hand, so I want to experiment with different milks before I write a proper post about it. But the fact that it worked at all felt like a small victory worth celebrating.

I started my day with a spoonful of the new yogurt and slipped into my morning kitchen rhythm.

First on the list was a batch of homemade ginger shots. I had an old carrot that needed using up and had run out of shots the day before — so the timing was perfect. I don’t own a juicer and I find it pointless buying one when the Nutribullet sitting on my counter does the job just fine. My method is simple: blend the fruit or vegetables with water and strain through a cloth over a sieve.

The first round was orange, carrot and lemon blended with water and pushed through the strainer. Before blending though, I zested both the lemon and the orange and set the zest aside — nothing gets wasted here. The second round was fresh ginger blended with water, strained so the juice joined the rest of the liquid to make the actual shot.

The ginger pulp — pure, concentrated ginger — went into a separate jar. I used it to start a ginger bug. A jar half filled with water, a spoon of ground ginger, a spoon of sugar. The rest of the ginger stays in the fridge so I can feed it a spoonful every day and watch it come alive over the coming week.

The citrus zest I had set aside earlier went straight into a batch of shortbread — the recipe for which is already up on the blog if you want it.

I also prepared a young nettle and apple cider vinegar tonic, which is now quietly brewing in the pantry. Two weeks of patience and then a spoonful every morning in water. The hedgerow doing what the hedgerow does.

To close out the day I dutifully scraped every bit of vegetable waste — including the spent teabags from my many cups throughout the morning — into the new compost I started this week. Nothing left behind. Nothing wasted.