Happy ValenSLIMES DAY 2012!

It's been a lovely Valentines Day this year.

We woke up to the announcement of the winner of the Great Sea Slug Beauty Contest, which just happened to be the nominee from my son--that is, Chromodoris kuniei!

Photography by Steve Childs used under Creative Commons license, via Healing Oceans Together.
Admission--The "Happy Valenslimes Day" was created by my son in honor of the aforementioned nudibranchs this year.


Then there was such a sweet Google Doodle in honor of Valentines Day:



The buzz in the blogosphere was over the scene at the end that showed two tuxedoed men as Valentines, but with our undersea orientation, we were more enraptured withe the spaceman and the octopus (I think it was supposed to be an alien, but we LOVE our cephapods):



Then tonight, my son and I fixed a special Valentines meal.  He made the dessert--sea slug-inspired chocolate truffles (do you think the whole sea slug thing has gone to our heads?)--and helped me make some homemade reddish tomato pasta.  I made some beef stroganoff to serve over it, along with sauteed asparagus and fresh red peppers (with olive and garlic antipasto to begin the meal).

All in all, perhaps not a traditional Valentines Day, but a lovely one.

Lesson Plan: Celebrating Diwali

Happy Diwali to all!  Diwali actually lasts for five days, but it is the third day that is supposed to be the most special.  That is the day that Hindus light candles and lamps throughout their house in order to attract Lashmi, the goddess of prosperity and good fortune, to come visit.  If she does, the coming year is supposed to be abundant and lucky.

So for our latest World Religions class, where we are studying Hinduism, the students made Diwali diyas, or ceramic candle holders, in preparation for the big event.  I don't know about everyone else, but we lit my son's for dinner tonight, as we ate some homemade chicken tikka masala on basmati brown rice with stir fried vegetables to celebrate.

I forget sometimes how much middle school students still like creating things with clay.  Every time we have a clay project, it is always a big hit.

See below for some of the students' creations:

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.

Curriculum Resource: Edible Mobius Strips

There is only one day left in the fundraiser for my friend Maria of Natural Math, who is trying to raise $6,200 for a community-based initiative to help parents, caretakers, and preschool teachers to introduce deep math concepts to children from infants to age 5.  Since the deadline is so near, we kind of have mobius strips on the brain (because the name of the project is Moebius Noodles).   We are thinking, breathing, and eating mobius strips...

And I mean that literally:

Yes, tonight's dinner consisted of edible mobius strips, made out of handmade pasta, courtesy of my brilliant son.  He is the one who had the idea of showing our support for the Moebius Noodle projects by making mobius strips out of actual noodles!

So we made some dough and pulled out the old pasta rolling machine:

Then we rolled out the dough, cut them into strips, and joined the ends of each strip together in that paradoxical inside/outside form that is the mobius strip:

It took quite a while, and it seemed like we had made 6,200 pieces of pasta, although I imagine it wasn't quite that many:

I had also made a homemade tomato sauce out of the fresh tomatoes and peppers from our local farmers market, combined them with some turkey meatballs, and VOILA!

Mobius Marinara!

And I share all this, not only because it is fun, but because it demonstrates the potential of the Moebius Noodles project.  First, I doubt my son would ever have had this idea without his exposure to Maria, because let's face it--cool things like Mobius strips aren't covered that much in traditional math curricula. Secondly, it illustrates the way that Maria makes math fun and concrete and real life in a way that works for children of all ages.  Sure, my son is a middle schooler, but toddlers could enjoy making a meal of mobius strips just as much.  Finally, Maria's concept for Moebius Noodles is to make it a community project, not just her personal product.  She wants to publish the ideas under a Creative Commons license, which means it would be free for others to use and adapt.  She also wants to make it a open web-based program where everyone can contribute ideas and resources.  So my son came up with this project, which was fun and worked out really well and which we are glad to share with others.  But what might you or your children come up that would not only work for your family, but might really benefit others--if you had a way to get it to them.  THAT is the idea behind Moebius Noodles--not simply a book or a commercial product, but a vehicle by which we can all access and add to the community of ideas about teaching even our youngest how to use and enjoy math.

So as of the time I'm writing this (10:00 PM on Monday, September 19), we only have 24 hours to raise the remaining $2,500 for this project (remember, with Tipping Bucket, if the entire sum isn't raised, all the money goes back to the donors).  So if you have been meaning to donate, but haven't gotten around to it, now is the time.  And whether you donate or not, stay tuned to developments with the Moebius Noodles project.  Maria wants your educational ideas and experience as much, if not more, as she would like your money.

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!

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!

Presidential Palate 5.5: Ulysses S. Grant

Ulysses S. Grant certainly presents a presidential paradox.  At a time when parts of the nation were scraping themselves back together from the ravages of war, Grant ushered in a new era of affluence and opulence among the industrialized North--the so-called Gilded Age.  After years of subsisting on plain Army fare (and supposedly have a personal preference for simple meals), Grant presided over some of the most abundant and over-the-top dinners the White House has ever seen!  As mentioned in yesterday's post, Grant was known for having 29 course banquets, which might cost $2,000 for 36 people (which, according to The Inflation Calculator, would cost over $33,000 in modern dollars, or over $900 per person).

Well, as much as I like to be authentic, there's no way that I'm going to fix 29 courses for a single meal.  But the good news is that after seeing a price tag of $900 per ticket, ANYTHING I serve is going to seem like a tremendous bargain.  Therefore, to represent this Gilded Age meal, I opted for quality over quantity.  So many things I read said that Grant really liked "fillet of beef," so the centerpiece of the meal was individual filet mignon steaks (quite a splurge for us, but, as I said, a real bargain compared to Grant's expenditures...especially because they are on sale at Harris Teeter this week).  The things I do for my son's educational benefit....

Another thing that is special about this meal is that I cooked the steaks in a Griswold cast iron pan.  Griswold is a company that was founded in 1865 (four years before Grant's first presidential term) that makes what some people consider to be the best ever American cast iron cookware (or at least, it used to--the company closed in 1957).  My father-in-law, who died last August, was a real character with all sorts of interests and passions, one of which was collecting Griswold pans.  We got our one Griswold pan from him, so I was thinking of him as we cooked these steaks.  He really enjoyed American history, and I think he would like the idea we were using this historical American cookware to teach his grandson American presidential history.

Anyway, here are the filets of beef, wrapped in bacon:

Ulysses S. Grant Filet of Beef

The dinner descriptions we read mentioned them served with masses of potatoes and mushrooms, so here is my son making the potatoes in the old-fashioned way:

Making Mashed Potatoes the Old-Fashioned Way

along with the mushrooms, which I am allergic to, but are a great favorite of my menfolk:

I made a Merlot Peppercorn sauce to go along with it:

and, of course, added some broccoli, although I don't think they ate that then (but I wanted to add something that was healthy):

Anyway, it was a really special meal, made even more special with the added family history.  So now you will understand if my son says that Grant is his favorite president, since most historians rank him fairly low among the presidents (besides overseeing Reconstruction, which is not really one of the highlights of our national history, and not getting high marks on handling the major economic depression that occurred during his term, his administration was replete with scandal, graft, and corruption).  So, great soldier, probably a good man, maybe not such a great president--but an outstanding meal nonetheless!

Presidential Palate 4, St. Patrick's Day Edition: Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln

So we've already made it up to the Civil War in our presidential quartets.  The theme for this meal was determined when I read that Abraham Lincoln ate his first inauguration's luncheon at the beautiful Willard Hotel next to the White House, and that it consisted of Mock Turtle Soup, Corned Beef and Cabbage, Parsley Potatoes, and Blackberry Pie.  Since St. Patrick's Day happened to fall during this week, we decided to kill two birds with one stone and combine our Presidential meal with our St. Patrick's Day celebration.

The combination made sense for reasons other than President Lincoln's predilection for corned beef.  Millard Fillmore was President during the latter half of the great Irish immigration in response to the Irish Potato Famine, and issues related to the hoards of new Irish and German immigrants plagued this entire set of chief executives.  Also, James Buchanan was a first-generation American, since his father had immigrated from Ireland.

Millard Fillmore, who came from a New York farm family, favored plain, simple food, and supposedly consumed a lot of soups and stews.  Therefore, we opened the meal with a soup course in his honor; however, to stay with the St. Patrick's theme, we made a cream and cabbage soup entitled "Pride of the Irish" soup (although we altered the recipe to make it a vegan dish):

Although it might not look too inspiring at first, a couple of minutes with my handy-dandy emersion blender turned it into this smooth, springy-green concoction:

that looked even better when garnished with a little cheese (soy cheese for my son) and chives:

Although James Buchanan was of Irish descent, he grew up in Pennsylvania (the only President from that state so far) and liked Pennsylvania Dutch food.  Pennsylvania Dutch food is not really Dutch, like the area in New York that Van Buren was from; the "Dutch" part was really an American mistranslation when German immigrants explained they were "Deutsch" (the German word for German, pronounced "Doysh").  So for Buchanan, we made a hot German Potato Salad.  However, I left out the traditional bacon (I try to avoid nitrates, and I figured the corned beef would have enough for one meal), and substituted parsley in anticipation of Lincoln's parsley potatoes.  I also swapped leeks for the onions; although I know leeks are primarily associated with Wales, I think the Irish used them a lot as well.

So, in addition to the soup, we had a lovely plate of hot potato salad, peas, and Mr. Lincoln's corned beef:

This was a big hit with the crowd--probably the best-received entire meal of the four Presidential menus we have cooked so far.  It was such a big hit, however, that we didn't have room for dessert, which was the item in honor of Franklin Pierce.  But we decided to celebrate Pierce on a latter occasion.

So tonight I made our St. Patrick's Day/Presidential Palate 4 meal, take 2.   This, ironically enough, is really a more traditionally Irish dish than the one we had on St. Paddy's Day itself.  The thing is, the Irish Irish rarely ate corned beef.  It was a favorite meal for the English, however, as well as the French, the Caribbean, and several other foreign locations.  So by the 19th Century, the English had taken over the Irish lands and turned the island into a major EXPORTER of corned beef.  In fact, it was the foreign love for Irish corned beef that could be blamed for the Irish Potato Famine of the mid 1800s.

What happened was that the English took all the prime agriculture land and turned it into pastures for cows that eventually got exported as corned beef.  They left only the poorest farming land to the Irish people to use to meet their own food needs.  Potatoes were one of the few crops that could grow in such poor soil, so by the middle of the 19th Century, about one third of the Irish were completely dependent on potatoes as their major food source.  So when the potato crop got wiped out, the poor had no other option for a food substitute.  This led to almost one million Irish starving to death, and another million leaving the country, reducing the total population by 20-25% over the course of about five years.

When the Irish got to the US, however, corned beef was relatively cheap.  Because it had been considered such a luxury food back home, the poor Irish immigrants ate as much as they could of it in their new home.  So the whole corned beef thing may make sense for American Irish, but really is a pretty sad story for the native Irish.

Anyway, this week my friend Sieglinde, who writes the FABULOUS Siggy Spice cooking-and-life blog,  posted her recipe for Bangers and Mash.  This traditional pub meal is really more representative of native Irish cooking, since the Irish have always eaten much more pork than beef.  So I followed her delicious recipe (which uses Guiness in the gravy--yum!), and made my mash not just out of potatoes, but also some leftover peas and broccoli I had (making it a healthier dish and turning it a more Irish-themed green than the traditional approach):

My guys LOVED this dish--so much, in fact, that I think this may become our new St. Patrick's Day tradition.  Now that I've realized the connection between corned beef and the Great Famine in Ireland, it doesn't seem like the best dish to celebrate all things Irish.

Then, after dinner, we finally got to eat Frankin Pierce's contribution--Fried Pies, a recipe from the President's Cookbook that was supposed to have been one of Pierce's favorite treats.  That recipe calls for dried apples, but I used fresh ones instead, and I also used maple syrup instead of sugar to reflect Pierce's New Hampshire roots.  These are actually deep fat fried, so we pulled out the iron skillet again:

After they were cooked, we drained them and rolled them in sugar and served while still warm and crispy:

These were another MAJOR hit!  So either we are getting better at all this, or else the antebellum Presidents had taste that was more similar to our family's preferences.

Either way, this project got us covering a lot of 19th Century history in addition to our four featured Presidents, and ended up with some favorite foods as well.

Pi Day Celebrations

Man, yesterday was a red letter day here with all the interdisciplinary math we had going on during Pi Day 2011!  In the morning, my son and I worked with Maria Droujkova of Natural Math on a one-page book showing division of fractions that I am writing and my son is illustrating (both of us with Maria's wise counsel, of course).

In the afternoon, we did some of our other work, but then we kicked off the evening with our traditional (well, at least we've done it for the past couple of years since Maria has introduced us to Pi Day) Pi Day dinner of Pizza Pi(e)s.  Each one of us had our own pies with varying degrees of pi-ness.

My husband's pizza was pretty typical, with pi mostly being represented by rounds of sausage:

Mine was more of a celebration of circles.  I began with a circle of ricotta cheese (an idea I took from a recent Cooking Light magazine), then a circle of organic basil, then a circle of feta cheese, then another circle of basil.

I then layered that with circles of onion, then layered tri-circles red and green pepper on top of that.

My son had the most Pi pie, though.  He cut his pepperoni and mushrooms into the shape of pi.

It was a fun and delicious way to mark Pi Day.

Then, after dinner, we had a wonderful discussion with author Joe D'Agnese about ways to use his book Blockhead:  The Life of Fibonacci in exposing students to a variety of math ideas, but also in relating math to both history and real life.  Thanks to those who joined us for the talk.  If you missed it (or want to review it), you can access the recording of the discussion through this link.

Finally, after midnight, we had the Random.org number generator pick for the winner of the Blockhead book giveaway.  The lucky winner is Ann Murphy!  Ann, please email me at ccross@mindspring.com and let me know what dedication you would like on your autographed book (if any) and the address to which to send it.  It is kind of fitting that Ann won, because she got an extra five entries because she posted the information about the contest and webinar through her social network.  So I kind of like the fact that someone with a statistic advantage actually won the Pi Day giveway--although, as I said, I left it up to the random number generator to pick the winning number.

Congratulations to Ann--let us know how you use the book once you get it.  And I will be posting the list of suggested books in a forthcoming blog post.