Spring and Gratitude

Today is Easter in North Carolina, so Happy Easter for those who celebrate this day!  Of course, the Jewish holiday of Passover has just occurred, so a belated Happy Passover to those readers.  And it wasn't too long ago that the Pagan holiday of Ostara took place, so good thoughts towards any of you who might be Wiccan or other variations of Paganism.  And there are probably some Spring celebrations in Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism that I just don't know about; if so, happy thoughts in your direction as well.

I'm sure that it is no coincidence that so many of these religious celebrations take place in Spring.  You don't have to follow any religious practice at all to be uplifted and inspired by the rebirth that takes place in Nature at this time of the year.  I'm noting that even though our past winter was so mild that it seems like turning into Spring wouldn't be that big of a deal, but the flowers and such seem even more intense this year, as if knowing they had to put on an extra special show in order to show off the contrast between the seasons in a year of temperate temperatures.

There are two non-religious Spring-related occasions that we particularly celebrate in our household, or at least we have for the past few years.  One is the opening of our local Farmers' Market in Cary.  While we do have access to fresh vegetables all year round at other Farmers' Markets in the area, the Cary market is shut down from December through March.  So by the time the first Saturday in April rolls around, I can't wait to see all my farmer friends and start buying fresh, local produce again directly from the producers.  And this year was extra special because, after a hiatus of a couple of years, the Cary Farmers' Market has once again move to downtown Cary, and is in even closer walking distance from my house than it was previously!  That means a lot to me in my ongoing efforts to reduce our family's carbon footprint.

Another event of great note in our home is the first fresh local strawberries of the year.  Every since reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (yes, that book AGAIN, for my regular readers....what can I say, it changed my life), I no longer buy fresh strawberries except locally during our relatively short growing season in North Carolina (read the book to find out why).  But I seriously love strawberries, so it is a big deal when they return to our diet, albiet for only a few, short, precious weeks.   So only buying local strawberries in season has really raised my appreciation for this wonderful fruit that is gone all too soon.

But this year, for the first time since I've been shopping at the Farmers' Market, Market Opening Day and First Strawberry Day coincided!  Apparently the mild winter has coaxed the local strawberries into blooming early.  So, joy of joy, I bought a mess of them, and they will be part of our Easter celebration at our spiritual center (we are having an egg hunt for the children, but the eggs will contain fruit instead of candy) and our Easter dinner table.  But I have already welcomed the strawberries by opening a bottle of champagne with a friend and drinking the sparkling wine with our first strawberries in the glass as well.

So pick what inspires you--your religious or spiritual tradition, Nature's beauty, the longer days, the warmer weather, or the return of the seasonal crops.  Spring is great time to be thankful for all the wonderful things that this planet continues to provide us, despite our often not-too-great stewardship of its resources.

I'll end with a lovely video on Nature and gratitude that my friend Lorna shared with me.  I hope you find it as inspiring as I did.




Enjoy!

Curriculum Resource: Food Rules Animated with Actual Food

Regular readers of this blog know that Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, changed my life.  After reading that book, I dramatically changed what food I bought and where I bought it as part of my ongoing effort to reduce our family's carbon footprint.  I think it is an incredibly important book, and I urge everyone to read it in order to understand why our current food choices are not environmentally sustainable.

Pollan followed up that book and his In Defense of Food book with a guideline for what we SHOULD be eating entitled Food Rules:An Eater's Manual.  This distills his advice about what foods we should be eating, both for our own health and the health of the planet.

Now animators Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle have created a short video of a talk on Food Rules that Michael Pollan gave.  His words are accompanied by a stop animation film using food itself to illustrate his points.....which I think is really kind of great.

So if you haven't read the books, at least start the ball rolling by watching the following video:



Michael Pollan's Food Rules from Marija Jacimovic on Vimeo.


We are talking about these kinds of issues in our Healing Oceans Together environmental group/educational coop.   But the books themselves raise issues that relate to many different disciplines, including biology, physics, chemistry, economics, political science, history.

I see these books relating to the posts I had last week about imagining the future and issues with STEM education.  They raise serious and potentially disasterous questions about our food production system, the breakdown of which could lead to our middle school students' future in competing for food in their own version of a "Hunger Game."  However, Pollan remains optimistic about things we could do differently, and does provide do-able suggestions for making better food choices.  So, as Maria raised in the comments, it does make our middle schoolers aware of potential problems in their future, but gives them reasons to hope and suggestions for things to do to improve the situation.

It is certainly a topic that can make many of these subjects very real to our students.

Curriculum Resource: Folding Circles for Pi Day

Today is Pi Day (March 14, or 3.14).  Of course, we celebrated with our traditional Pizza Pi(e)s.  But because Google informed me it was also the 101st birthday of Akira Yoshizawa, who is considered the grandfather of origami (see below):



I went searching for origami and circles, and chanced upon this wonderful website, WholeMovement.com.  The author, Bradford Hansen-Smith, inspired in part by Buckminster Fuller, has compiled tons of information about all the mathematical  and other concepts one can learn by folding circles.  It doesn't take fancy equipment--he starts with paper plates and bobby pins--but it can take you deep into mathematical and geometric concepts.

So a great way to observe Pi Day (besides eating pie, pizza or otherwise) is to check out his website.

Curriculum Resource: The 50th Anniversary of Americans in Space

Today we can celebrate not only our Founding President and the President who led our nation through its greatest challenge, but also 50 years of Americans in space.  On February 20, 1962, astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the planet in his Friendship 7 space capsule (Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first person to orbit the Earth in his Volstok space craft the previous year).   Americans at the time were transfixed during Glenn's approximately four-hour flight, which would lead in just a few years to Americans being the first humans to walk on the moon.

NASA is marking the occasion with an online interactive educational resource on Friendship 7 and the Mercury Space Program.  It has lots of facts and multimedia materials to explore, including interactive views of the interiors of the space capsules, the rocket technology, components of the space suits, flight trajectories, etc.  It also includes video footage of various aspects.

Below is one item from that website. It is a 25 minute video NASA has produced on the 50th Anniversary of Friendship 7:



I think it is hard for our middle schoolers, for whom space travel is such a regular occurence that no one even follows it any more, to realize how revolutionary it seemed at the time.  So I would add to the official NASA videos a couple of great movies about the space program--The Right Stuff and Apollo 13 (which is one of my favorite movies ever).

Hmmm...perhaps after I fix a version of last year's Presidents Day meal, we need to settle down in front of a great space flick tonight....

Happy Chinese New Year 2012

Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year, and this year happens to be the year of the dragon.  So, of course, we had to have a meal to celebrate this august occasion.

In honor of this event, I fixed my version of a traditional Chinese dish called Phoenix and Dragon. One thing to know about this dish is while it might be called Phoenix around here, it is very different from the phoenix that most American's think of.  In Chinese, it is called Fenghuang, and it is a mixture of different birds--roosters, sparrow, peacocks, etc.--none of whom necessarily re-generate after a fire.

However, the dish itself is a lovely stir fry of several ingredients, including chicken (to represent phoenix), shrimp (to represent dragon), vegetables (to represent health), and spices (to represent taste and sensation).

The meal refers to ancient Chinese beliefs, in which the dragon and phoenix or fenghuang are two of the four most revered animals.  While both animals are supposed to have male and female aspects, the dragon came to represent the male leader, or emperor of China, and the phoenix the female, or emperor's wive or emperoress.

The year of the dragon is supposed to be an especially auspicious period, so let's hope that is true for us all!

Book Review: Pie by Sarah Weeks

Pie by Sarah Weeks









As befitting the name, this is a sweet, sweet book. I had to love this book, because the opening of the novel revolves around one of my favorite affirmations: Do what you love and the money will follow. It’s something that I’ve always tried to follow, although sometimes it is a hard path. So I’m always excited when even a fictional character demonstrates the efficacy of this approach to life.

So the main protagonist, Alice, has an aunt who also apparently ascribes to this philosophy (which is never stated in the book--I’m bringing this to the story). Aunt Polly loves to make pies...and not just any pies, but pies with the sweetest, juiciest fruit, the dreamiest cream fillings, and the flakiest crusts. When she is left with a modest inheritance, Aunt Polly uses it to open up a pie shop. However, there is a catch to Aunt Polly’s pies--she refuses to accept payment for any of them. If she exchanged them for money, why, that would take all the joy out of them!

The small town in which she lives wants to make sure that the supply of pies, each tailored to specific people’s preferences, keep coming, so they find other ways to support the pie shop. And that makes everyone happy, but no one as much as Alice, who not only loves the pies, but the pie maker as well. She sits and talks and helps in the kitchen as much as possible, always knowing that she will never have the same magic touch with the pies that her aunt does.

Then, suddenly, Aunt Polly dies. She leaves the pie shop to the church, and the secret pie crust recipe, that companies have offered lots of money for, to...her cat? And it is Alice’s responsibility to care for the fat, ill-tempered white feline, named after Aunt Polly’s favorite brand of lard. Her mother (Polly’s sister) feels cheated out of a proper inheritance, her father is allergic to cats, and the cat itself hisses and scratches whenever Alice approaches. All this does not bode well for a happily-ever-after ending.

The story leads into a mystery involving break-ins, missing cats, stolen pies, and more. But I don’t think the mystery is really the heart of this book. Rather, it is a book with a lot of heart--love of what you do, love of friends and family, love of community. I enjoyed it, but I don’t see it as a strong Newbery contender. But as a fairly light read to help remind us all about what really matters in life, it is a great book.

Plus, it’s got RECIPES--and they all look tempting!

New Year's Day 2012 Blog: Welcoming the New Year

Welcome to 2012!

That was what I wrote on the white board for the Sunday School class I taught this morning.  We had a really great discussion about "outside of the class" things they enjoyed last year and wanted to do this year. We're going to try for our first-ever "lock-in" for this class, some fun and interesting fundraisers, and some experiential spiritual workshops.  I don't want to give away all of our secrets, but let's just say that have some real "out of the box" ideas that I think our entire spiritual community will enjoy.

In addition to some brainstorming and planning, we did a nice Buddhist meditation that is called "Transcending Karma" that helps us detach from our past, and participated in our annual New Year's Burning Bowl and White Stone Ceremony, which I describe last year in this post.

It was a gorgeous day, so our family had a nature walk to enjoys the great outdoors.  Then we came home and ate our traditional "nuevo-Southern" New Years Dish of white chicken chili (made with black-eyed beans, which we feel compelled to eat on New Years but don't really like on their own, but are delicious in chili) and green salad (I can't cook collards, so we have fresh leafy greens instead).

All in all, a pretty fantastic way to spend the first day of the year.  If the next 364 days go anything like this, we're in for a wonderful year!

This will be the last of my holiday posts.  However, starting tomorrow,  I will be running a time-related series of posts.  What could they be?  Check back tomorrow evening to find out......

Kawanzaa 2011 Blog: Cary Kawanzaa Celebration

In our attempts to include all the seasonal holidays in our celebrations, today my son and I went to a portion of the 17th annual Cary Kawanzaa celebration.  This was held in our new Arts Center, and included African dancing, a marketplace of African American arts and related goods, and craft activities for the children:

They were also selling plates of African food, so we bought some Chicken Karenga, an aromatic dish of chicken and seasonal vegetables in a slightly curryish-tasting sauce, served over yellow rice:

While it is not aimed at us, it was nice to have a taste of a holiday that seeks to remind people of such values as Unity, Self-Determination, Creativity, and Cooperative Economics.  Looking back at all the fighting and political battles over this past year, it seems like we would all be better off if we paid more attention to Kawanzaa, whether we are African Americans or not.

Hanukkah Blog 2011: Lighting the Cupcake Menorah

Happy Hanukkah!  The eight-day celebration of Hanukkah begins today, December 20, at sundown.  We are not Jewish, but we have a greater appreciation of Jewish traditions since our study of Judaism in our World Religions class last year.

We are currently in Washington, DC, visiting my father (who lives there) and other family members (who are coming for what my son calls "the annual Cross family Christmas reunion") and seeing the sights.  But if we were at home, I would be tempted to make the fabulous Hanukkah Cupcake Menorah from the very interesting blog, Shiska in the Kitchen.  The cupcakes she makes for her menorah are Coconut Chocolate Chip Cupcakes--doesn't that sound wonderful?  Yum!

She also has a nice recipe for a more traditional Hanukkah food, potato latkes, along with some tips about how to make these deceptively-simple treats turn out neither burned nor soggy.

But blessings to any Jewish readers who celebrate Hanukkah, while the rest of us can just enjoy the good food!

Curriculum Resource: Thanksgiving Science From Science Jim

Here's a little bit of learning to sneak in for the holiday.  Our favorite online science educator, Science Jim, has posted a video of a class he did last year on Thanksgiving topics, covering topics like whether eating turkey really makes you sleepy and did Ben Franklin really try to combine turkey and electricity.  Just click below to sneak in a little science along with all the good food!



Science Jim Show: Thanksgiving and Ben Franklin! from Science Jim on Vimeo.

Food Day 2011

Did you know that today was the first annual Food Day?  Did you do anything special to celebrate it?

Food Day is an event organized by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, primarily as a political/policy advocacy day to promote sustainable agriculture and reduce the subsidies, environmental impacts, and marketing power for big factory agribusiness (see their stated goals here).

My observation of the day wasn't too political, beside sending their message to my federal representatives via their website.  Rather, I tried fixing dinner made as much as possible from ingredients from some of our small local farmers.  I figured that if Barbara Kingsolver could eat for a year using only local food, as she described in her wonderful book, Animal Vegetable Miracle, I ought to be able to scrape up a locavore dinner for one night.

But even one entire meal wasn't as easy to do as one might think.  I had to start the project on Saturday morning of the weekend before, when our local farmers markets are open.  I bought my usual supplies from our downtown Cary Farmers Market, but then had to go to the Western Wake Farmers Market as well for some foods the downtown one doesn't carry.  I also had to go to a specialty store to buy some cream and butter from a localish dairy, Homeland Creamery, whose milk-based products are just SO luscious (and without growth hormones and antibiotics and such)!

So I ended up making my own recipes for this "Real Meal" local supper, which I was also trying to keep low sugar, low carbohydrate for my diabetic husband.  As a main course, we had a casserole of zucchini, onions, and nitrite-free sausage, baked in a light sauce of natural cream, eggs, and local raw milk cheese.

I served that with a salad and a roll from a local bakery.

Then for dessert, I served a no-added-sugar, carb-light apple crisp.  I cut up the apples, mixed them with butter and cinnamon and ground cloves, then covered them with some oats, some coconut, and some more cinnamon.

This I served with the thick Homeland Creamery cream beaten to soft peaks, but again without any added sugar.  My husband added some artificial sweetener to his portion, but I honestly thought it was fine just as it was.

I think it ended up being a lovely meal, yet still pretty healthy.  The thing about using the superior local cream, butter, and cheese is that you can use a surprisingly small amount, but because they are so tasty, you think that it is much richer and caloric than it really is.

However, I have to admit that not everything was local.  I got the zucchini, salad greens, and apples from our usual produce source, the Norris farm (which I wrote about previously), and the eggs from Spain Farms, who are at the market with the Norrises.  The spicy nitrite-free sausage was from Fickle Creek Farm in Efland, and the wonderful Eno Mountain Sharp cheese was made by the Hillsborough Cheese Company.  And, of course, the dairy items came from Homeland Creamery.

But I did have to go "conventional" to get the onions, olive oil and vinegar for the salad dressing, the oats, the coconut, and the ground cinnamon and cloves.  So, as I said, I can't claim it to be 100% local, although the major ingredients all were.

It was a great challenge--one I think I will try taking on more often.  Perhaps we'll try making "Food Day" dinner a monthly event.

PS--My son recently asked in his blog for me to do a post on cooking.  So in part, this blog post is for him.

The Most Adorable (and Tasty) Star Trek Tribute EVER!

We interrupt our regular educational programming with the following announcement:

CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT TODAY IS THE 45TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST STAR TREK EPISODE!!!!!!

Yikes!  I watched Star Trek as a child, and granted, that was 45 years ago, but still, somehow, it seems shocking....

But I've always loved Star Trek, especially the original series in all its cheesy and earnest glory.  My husband was more of a "Second Generation" guy (and, admittedly, the Borg is a great concept), but those characters never captured my heart the way James T. Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, Uhuru, Sulu, and Chekov did.

Which is why I am so enraptured by this:

from Darla at Bakingdom.com, one of my new favorite blogs.

Can you believe she made the entire cast into cookies?  You can see them all up close on her post, along with details about her recipes and techniques involved in recreating everyone in flour, sugar, and butter.

Her entire site is filled with similarly creative pastries and other goodies.  Truly, her stuff is incredible.  I like to use food to enhance certain educational ideas and subject, like our Presidential Palate series of cooking a meal to represent the US Presidents, but I can't hold a candle to her when it comes to cookie- and cake-based tributes.

However, her tasty Star Trek reminders does make me think about incorporating watching some Star Trek into our 20th century history this year once we get to the 1960's.  The original series had a political agenda; Gene Roddenberry wanted it to support the anti-war, feminist, and pro-Civil Rights positions of the 60's counter culture.  And as I reported in an earlier post, actress Nichelle Nichols has a story of a chance encounter with Martin Luther King Jr., who called himself "the biggest Trekkie on the planet," and claimed that Star Trek gave people a concrete vision of how life could be if we were committed to equality and peace (well, not that there wasn't plenty of fighting in Star Wars, but the goals were always to forward peace).   The show was pretty radical for its time, especially with the racially-mixed crew and television's first scripted inter-racial kiss.

So maybe I can justify revisiting some of my favorite childhood memories for academic purposes!

The Great Potato Cookoff

As we look back on summer, my son has learned a lot of things.  His greatest accomplishments have come in his swimming--he went from refusing to put his head underwater in May to being able to dive in and swim the length of the pool with free style or backstroke, and is working on breast stroke and butterfly.  Granted, his form could still use some work, but still, he has really come so far this summer that it is really impressive.

He's also created his own book of poetry, completed several small books on dividing a fraction by a fraction, tried some calligraphy, and learned the difference between the three major periods of classical music and whose music exemplifies the trend in each.

But then there is one think he learned that may be more useful than all of those.  For this summer, we learned to make....gnocchi.

It all began when we got some potatoes from our friend, Maria Droujkova of Natural Math, and my son decided we should use them in "The Great Potato Cookoff."  The idea of this grand event was to invite some people over and have everyone cook a different potato dish.  The purity of his vision was muddied by his mother, who insisted we include at least a couple of other things, like maybe VEGETABLES and PROTEIN, but the mainstays of the meal was potato, potato, and potato.

We were so lucky, however, because one of our friends had an Italian grandmother who had shown her how to make gnocchi, the Italian potato dumpling.  So she came over and showed us.  The secret, at least according to the Italian grandmother, is that the gnocchi must be formed with a SILVER fork--not stainless steel.  So I pulled out the silver, and we went to town.

It was really fun, and the gnocchi turned out so well!

Meanwhile, my son, who is a soup lover, made some creamy potato soup, not, alas, from an ancient relative's recipe, but from some site he found on the Internet.  However, he did a good job with it, and it tasted really good, even if it it didn't have that personal family connection.

We preceded the meal with an outside fire (a frequent occurrence at our house) made by my husband, over which we brewed some tea:

Here is our final assortment of dishes.  The bowl by the silver water bottle has potatoes from the grill (and we also grilled some vegetables and chicken and pork sausages), plus gnocchi with tomato sauce, gnocchi with pesto sauce, and the potato soup.

Just one of the many happy memories we have of the Summer of 2011!

A New Day-Before-School-Starts Tradition?

As I said, since we homeschool, we don't have quite the same "back to school" business.  However, most organized homeschool classes and coops and such start up around the same time as the public schools do.  Thus, we homeschool parents are also in the midst of finalizing plans, working on curricula, pulling together educational resources, and other start-up activities that the school teachers are.

So it was really, really nice today when my son decided that he would fix me breakfast in bed.  He insisted on me staying upstairs in my bedroom, while he fixed some lovely multi-grain pancakes.  He brought them up and served them without spilling syrup anywhere, and seems to have cooked them on his own without burning anything and without leaving a big mess for me to clean up (or make him clean up himself, since our rule is "if you spill it, you clean it") once I descended from my queen-for-a-day (or morning, at least) treatment.  It was a special treat, and I really appreciated.

Later it occurred to me that it really ought to be a pre back-to-school ritual among all his peers:  to fix their parents breakfast in bed on the last day before school starts.  Because we are always focused on getting them ready for school restarting, and easing their transition, and helping them get into the swing of things, and handling their anxiety, yada yada yada.  But what about us?  It's not only our children who have new levels of work once their full-time schooling starts again.  Usually, it means an increase in our work levels as well--getting lunches made, signing all the requisite paperwork, getting the students to the bus stop or the school on time, increased laundering of school uniforms, sports outfits, dance clothes, and the like, not to mention the biggie--helping with HOMEWORK (or teaching it all, if you are a homeschooler).  Then there is the big draw on our time for all the ancillary activities--making food for kickoff potlucks or PTA meetings, providing the snacks for soccer or Lego leagues, and the rest.  Then there is all the driving--to school or classes, to tutoring, to practices, to recitals, to scouts, to church or other spiritual youth groups...and on and on and on.  SOMEONE ought to be taking care of us before we have to face all that again.

So parents, forward this link to your middle schoolers.  Of course, for many of you (especially if you live in Wake County), it's too late to do it this year on the day before the first day of school.  But that's OK--you can take a raincheck for breakfast in bed for sometime this weekend--THIS year.

But I think this is a tradition whose time has come!

Bento Box Blog Inspires Back to School Lunches

Tomorrow (by the time most people read this; Thursday, August 25th, which is technically two days from when I wrote it) is the first day of school for traditional calendar schools in Wake County, NC, where I live.  Since we homeschool, it doesn't effect us directly.  But I'm thinking good thoughts for all of my friends who will be sending their children off for a new school year tomorrow.

While this wasn't a deciding factor, I'm so happy I don't have to get my son dressed, with his books and other stuff together, and out the door for the school bus at the early hours required for schools around here. And I glad I don't have to face the chore of making portable lunches every morning.

BUT...if I did...I found some inspiration for new levels of boxed lunch-making at the blog, BentoLunch.  In it, a Texas mother displays photos of the lunches she makes for her two sons based on the Japanese Bento philosophy of small containers of different-colored food.  The Japanese have a whole theory about it that I don't know and so won't try to contain, but their "lunch boxes" contain containers to hold a variety of different food, displayed in a beautiful way.

I don't think Shannon, the author of the blog, particularly follows the Japanese theory either.  But she sure creates some adorable and healthy-looking lunches!  Her boys are younger, but I think that many a middle schooler would love to open up a lunch like the ones on her blog (albeit with much larger portion sizes, at least among the boys I know).  And while some might find them intimidating at first, lots of the special treats are created using cookie cutters, and/or are simply enhanced by having some cute doo-dads to stick in to make some ordinary foods look special.

So for any parents (or students, for that matter) who are looking for some new ideas to make their boxed lunches more creative--check out BentoLunch.

My other special treat for my school-going friends is to repeat my favorite quote from what is probably my leading Newbury award contender for this year (so far), Gary Schmidt's Okay For Now.  This is a speech that is given to incoming students in the book, which is set in 1968:

"Within a year, possibly by next fall," he was saying, "something that has never before been done, will be done. NASA will be sending men to the moon. Think of that. Men who were once in classrooms like this one will leave their footprints on the lunar surface." He paused. I leaned in close against the wall so I could hear him. "That is why you are sitting here tonight, and why you will be coming here in the months ahead. You come to dream dream. You come to build fantastic castles into the air. And you come to learn how to build the foundations that make those castles real. When the men who will command that mission were boys your age, no one knew that they would walk on another world someday. No one knew. But in a few months, that's what will happen. So, twenty years from now, what will people say of you? 'No one knew then that this kid from Washington Irving Junior High School would grow up to do".....what? What castle will you build?"

That's the kind of education that every one of our children deserves, whether they are going to public, private, or home school.  Here's hoping this is the kind of teacher your child will get--and/or this is the kind of teacher you will be--this year!

Happy Birthday Harry Potter!

The books may be done, and the last movie may have been released, but we will still be celebrating Harry Potter for years to come!  Because his birthday is supposed to be July 31, it seemed that an observation of that occasion was in order.

We incorporated it into our science coop by fixing a Harry Potter meal and by continuing our work on Harry Potter genetics (which we started last week when we bred dragons). We started on our assignment, but all went home to re-read the books to fill in some of the question marks in our investigation, which I will describe in more detail in a future post when we have figured it out better.

However, in honor of Harry's birthday, we also did some cooking.  First, we made our version of Cornish pasties, which are mentioned several times in the book, since they are a traditional English dish.

To make things even more festive, we washed our pasties down with the famous Harry Potter Butterbeer.  There are lots of recipes for Butterbeer around, especially since the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, FL, opened and started serving them cold.  But the recipe I've always been inspired by was vanilla ice cream, laced with a caramel/butterscotch/butter brickle add-in, added to a warm mug of either boiled apple cider (enhanced with soda water if it was not of the effervescent variety itself) or heated  cream soda.


Either way, the dish is a lovely drink.  We started by making the caramel,  then adding it to vanilla ice cream to liven things up.  

A scoop of the icream then goes into heated (or not) cream soda or apple cider.

It makes a lovely frothy birthday treat.

We made that meal on Friday with our Science Coop, but the actual date is Sunday, July 31.  We had some left-over butterbeer ice cream, so we used that to make another treat.

We made some Ginger Newts (the cookie or "biscuit" in Professor McGonagall's office in HP and the Order of the Phoenix, I believe...), and then layered them with some of the extra butterbeer ice cream.

It made a treat worthy of the birthdate of everyone's favorite wizard!

Is It Un-American If You've Never Eaten a Big Mac? (If You Aren't A Vegan/Vegetarian, of course)

Today is apparently National Hamburger Day.  So, of course, I thought we would have hamburgers for dinner.  Then something occurred to me.  My son has never eaten a Big Mac.  Is it un-American of me not to expose him to what may be the most famous American dish in the world, the renowned "two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-bun" of commercial fame?

It is not that we don't eat hamburgers, at least now.  I didn't eat beef for over 25 years after reading Diet for a Small Planet  by Francis Moore Lappe and realizing the environmental impact of eating meat, particularly beef.  But several years ago, after trying to become more of a locavore after reading The Ominovore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen, I started to eat beef again because it was easier to get local beef than it was to get local poultry under North Carolina's food laws, and I've given up most fish that isn't sustainable, although that makes it really expensive.   But my husband and son really favor beef, so hamburgers are a part of our diet these days.

Fast food, however, is not.  My son and I abandoned the fast food industry in 2005, when we watched the movie Supersize Me, which told the story of documentarian Morgan Spurlock's attempt to survive for one month eating only food from McDonald's.




So my son, who was only six at the time, watched about 15 minutes of the movie, and then turned to me and said, "I'm never eating at McDonald's again."  "The problem is, honey," I told him, "that the other fast food places aren't really any better."

And that was it.  Since that day, we have only eaten at fast food restaurants under "emergency" situations, like when we are traveling and we can't find anything else open, or when my mother was clearly going downhill rapidly (physically and mentally speaking), and she really wanted to eat at Wendy's.  I'm really proud of my son, because since seeing that movie, he has never been tempted at all to cheat, despite whatever wonderful Happy Meal toy McDonald's was pitching to the children.

But, of course, at the time we abandoned McDonald's, he was too young and his appetite was too small to be eating a Big Mac.  So he's never tasted one.  Of course, there are many other mainstream things he has never experienced--like going to school.  But, still, it crossed my mind that maybe he should know what the big deal is about a Big Mac.

Then I found this great website.  It is called The Burger Lab:  Building a Better Big Mac.  It is really fantastic, because this guy has figured out everything about how to have a Big Mac experience, but with healthier and even better-tasting ingredients.  I mean, this guy even calculated how many sesame seeds there should be on the bun!

Of course, his version of the dish was much too much work for me to do, at least tonight.  But now at least I know that, should I really decide that I'm not a good mother if I don't provide my son with the Big Mac experience, I know where to go to get the ultimate recipe for it.

Lesson Plan: Mendel's Experiments in Genetics

Happy Mendel's Birthday to all!  As Google let us know, it is the 189th birthday of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian scientist who first recorded the patterns of reproduction, famously breeding peas to see what traits were passed onto the next generation, and thus earned the title of Father of Genetics.

Like I've said before, we like to celebrate everything around here, so we had a Gregor Mendel birthday party today.  We invited some friends over and together did an activity based on Mendel's cross-breeding peas experiment.  But since we didn't have the time for new plants to grow, plus peas aren't really that exciting for middle school-aged students, we did a simulated cross-breeding of a much more interesting life form suggested by our recent excursion to see the last Harry Potter movie--we did our simulated gene pool analysis based on breeding dragons!  We used a wonderful lesson plan developed at Vanderbilt and added onto by former middle school teacher Nancy Clark called "Inheritance Patterns in Dragons," which you can download from this page. (But if you aren't into dragons, but are into Harry Potter, there is another site where you can map the genetic path through which Muggles can produce witches and wizards and magical folk can have Squibbs from the National Institute of Health.)

After a general explanation of DNA and genetics, each student chose a set of seven "genes" with different dominant or recessive traits from the same male and female parents.

However, a worksheet helped them figure out what traits would be expressed in each specific offspring (fire breathing vs. no fire, number of toes or spines, color of body, wings, and tale, etc.).  Then each student drew a picture of a dragon with the genetic trails of that pairing.

So, for example, all the dragons (different in style though they might be) had blue bodies--obviously a dominant trait.  Three of the four had red wings and red tails; however, one had yellow wings and a yellow tail.  This demonstrates the fact that the same parents can produce a smaller number (statistically) of offspring with recessive trails, even if the parents themselves don't show those traits.

Anyway, the students really enjoyed it, and seemed to be clear about the basics of genetic inheritance after doing this exercise.

Plus, because it was, after all, a birthday party, I made a dish of Dragon Dip:

This is basically a healthier and vegan version of nachos, with whole wheat tortillas as the skeleton, tomato salsa as the blood, refried bean dip as the muscle, and, in honor of Mendel, peas as the dragon skin (except for the wings, where the skin is made of corn.  It is finished off with a grape tomato for its eye and dried jalapeno peppers as the fire breathing part, heated in the oven until hot, and them consumed with dragon skills (tortilla chips).

There are also some great online resources to use to explore this topic.  BioLogica has two web labs on genetics:  an online dragon genetics simulation, and animations of topics like meiosis along with a pea breeding experiment (like Mendel's) that is based on the fairy tale of the Princess and the Pea.  The Pea Soup website tells Mendel's story, as well as having an interactive simplified simulation of the pea experiment.

This is a fun topic to explore with middle schoolers, especially if you can include some of these more imaginative resources.....and everything goes better with some dragon-based food!

Happy Bastille Day!

Happy Bastille Day!  Bastille Day is, of course, French National Day, observed every July 14th as the anniversary of the storming of the infamous French prison, the Bastille.  In line with our general philosophy of celebrating every holiday that we can, we had marked this day previously in years past.  However, since we actually studied the French Revolution this past year, it seemed appropriate to make an even bigger occasion of Bastille Day then usual.

Yesterday we invited some friends over to help prepare a French meal with us.  We started by munching on apples and a French baguette while we chopped up food for our main dish.

We then had meat fondue, cooking our steak, chicken, or sausage (consumed along with some fresh raw vegetables) in boiling broth rather than the more traditional, but less healthy or safe, boiling oil.

We concluded the meal with home made cream puffs--home made puff pastries filled with hand-whipped cream and blackberry curd homemade from berries our friends had picked themselves.

Delicious!  They were consumed almost immediately, of course....

Today I'm trying a less traditional dish.  I'm making what I am calling Lasagna Provencal--kind of a cross between traditional Lasagna and Ratatouille, accompanied by baguette once again.

If nothing else, you should at least mark the occasion by watching this video about the French Revolution from the History Teachers series that I've mentioned before:




Enjoy!

A New Independence Day Tradition?

As I explained in yesterday's post, our 4th of July traditions center around the actual history behind the 4th of July.  However, we're not such history nerds that we don't add in some food and some fireworks.  But yesterday's food contained something new.

A few days ago, my son announced that he had decided that he was no longer allergic to dairy and eggs.  Now, he has been testing allergic to those things, along with many others, since he was a baby.  (It was really bad when he was young;  as I told someone recently, I made the frosting for his first birthday cake out of mashed sweet potato because he was allergic to dairy, corn, and soy--basically all the butter and butter alternatives available at the time.)   And ever since he was really young, he has been very good about not eating the things to which he is allergic, or complaining that he couldn't have ice cream or pizza or other things that his friends could eat.

However, in many cases, allergies change as part of all those physical developments in adolescent.  Sometimes, allergies get better or disappear altogether, although the opposite can also happen; in my case, my allergies got worse when I was about 12....come to think of it, when I was about my son's age.

We had noticed that my son's skin problems, which is where his food allergies seemed to have manifested themselves, had been doing much better recently, and discussed whether maybe he had outgrown his allergies.  But, unknown to me or my husband, my son had been doing some experimentation by eating some of the cheese we had for other family members, and sometime or other, cooking and eating an egg, which we keep for his father to fix omelettes for himself when we aren't around for a meal.  And he seemed to be doing OK after eating those foods.

So as part of our Independence Day celebration, we made something that there is not really a good dairy-free substitute for--a Red, White, and Blue Cheesecake.  We used the ingredients that he had traditionally been allergic to--real cream cheese and eggs, as opposed to soy cream cheese or tofu and Egg Replacer.

However, not throwing caution (or health) to the wind, we made ours with coconut milk and minimal sugar, and decorated the top with red and blue fruit in its natural state:

So we are waiting to see if any health problems occur after eating such formerly forbidden foods.  But I hope not, for my son's sake.  It would be wonderful if we can celebrate this holiday as a day where he declared his freedom from his dietary restrictions.  If so, we may make this dessert a new addition to our Independence Day observances.

Sometimes these physical changes that our middle schoolers are going through can bring about some positive changes.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that will be the case for our son.