A few years ago, I decided to try and make my own yoghurt. I think we had just finished taking part in Waste Free February for the first time and I was hyper aware of single use plastic. Yoghurt, it turned out, was one of the main culprits in our household. As a healthy snack which my children actually eat, at that time we regularly bought yoghurt in small pots or squeezy tubes as it was so convenient for lunchboxes!

After some quick Internet research and some reassurance from my mum (apparently my Nana used to make her own yoghurt all the time), I decided to give it a go. I mean, how hard could it be?

Equipped with a large thermos flask and a milk thermometer, I heated up milk, added some live yoghurt and left the concoction overnight in the flask. (Please don’t use this as a recipe – I think there was more to it than that)!

The next day I excitedly opened the flask to discover a lumpy, curdled, milky substance which did actually taste a bit like yoghurt. However, the texture was so unappealing and the taste so unpleasant (without the sugar and fruit that make yoghurt taste nice), I knew I would never convince my family to eat it!

I’m ashamed to say that that one attempt marked the end of my yoghurt making experiment. On balance, I concluded that life is too short to faff about making barely edible milky slop!

So how to address the single use plastic problem? Well, we compromised. We still buy yoghurt in plastic, only now we buy the largest pot available and decant it into smaller reusable tubs for lunchboxes.

And I try to reuse the yoghurt pots as much as possible. My yoghurt of choice is now Lidl’s Milbona creamy yoghurt which comes in a 1 kg tub (think small bucket). Not only is the yoghurt delicious, the tubs are so useful! We have used these tubs in so many ways such as storing food, for DIY, even as buckets on the beach!