mathmom's blog

This afternoon, Luke got hungry. So without any help from anyone else, he got out Michael's birthday pie (strawberry, of course). He then got out the pie server from the drawer, got out Amanda's can of soy whipped cream, added "just a little bit" as he says, and ate the last piece of pie. It's hard to know what to do with this type of initiative. On the one hand, he was hungry and he solved the problem, quite elegantly and completely, with no help from anyone. He paid careful attention to the correct way to eat pie, down to the server and the whipped soy stuff, which he put back in the fridge when he was done. He cleared his dish when he was done. On the other hand, I do kind of wish he would ask before doing things of this sort... I guess you can't win. Strawberry Glace pie, from Better Homes and Gardens cookbook Baked pie shell 8 cups berries 2/3 c water 2/3 c sugar 2 Tbsp corn starch Wash and hull strawberries. Take out 1 cup berries, set the rest as...

One of Ella's chores (suggested by her Aunt L.) is to put the stuff in the bread maker every night and program it so we have warm bread in the morning. This works well, and is also a great science experiment. We have discovered that: Bread made without salt looks OK but is barely edible. Bread made with 3 times the salt is inedible, and doesn't rise right. Bread made with no yeast is edible, sort of like a tasty rock is edible, and Ella really needs a system to make sure she puts the right ingredients in the right amounts in the right order. I've encouraged her to line up the ingredients on the counter before she starts along with the correct measuring equipment. After the last failure she allowed that that might be a good idea. We'll see. Here's our recipe for bread: 1 1/4 cup water 2 Tbsp. Earth Balance buttery stick 1 1/2 tsp. salt 1 1/2 Tbsp. sugar 2 cups whole wheat flour (we get ours from Great Harvest) 1 cup white flour (bread flour makes it rise better) ...

It is very interesting to see what the kids get up to when weare not around. Gramma and Grampa came to visit, and supervised what ended up being the Acorn Project . Grampa blogged about it, fortunately, or I would never have known even half of what happened.

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child! (Apologies to Shakespeare!) Luke managed to find a black sharpie permanent marker in the living room. I hadn't realized it was there, as it was in a box with lots of other things in it. He proceeded to write on many things. He wrote: on the cabinets on the floor on the train tracks on the coffee table on the tan leather couch (of course, not the dark green one that we don't like as much) on the angel food cake pan Where was I while all this was happening? Blissfully unaware, making very delicious cinnamon-apple bread with my daughters. Or criminally negligent, depending on how guilty I am feeling at the moment. It took about 5 minutes, so I guess I shouldn't feel too bad. People say "House-proof the baby, don't baby-proof the house." I have seen it argued that kids who don't ordinarily get exposed to dangerous things can't handle it when they are exposed to those dangerous...

Recently we've been using the timer function on the bread machine to make delicious bread that is finished baking right when we wake up. For a long time we've used the coffee maker timer to prepare coffee that is ready as we come downstairs. A few weeks ago there was a potluck at church. We live 35 minutes away, so we weren't going to come back here to get the food out of the oven or anything like that. Solution: cook the split pea soup in the slow cooker overnight, bring it to church and plug it in to warm before lunch. Easy! I love that it smells so good in our house when we wake up after cooking overnight. It does feel a bit like Wallace's inventions (see Wallace and Grommit by Nick Park) doing all the work for us while we sleep. But I think the thing I like most is the feeling of getting something useful done while I'm asleep. Now if there were only some way to do the laundry while sleeping... For your pleasure, my recipe for Split Pea Soup: Slow Cooker ...

Wednesday was the final cooking club of the summer. We made pizza, x-ray bananas, and puppy chow. Pizza is one of those great recipes that can be made by amateurs and comes out looking fabulous. I made the pizza dough before hand, and we sprinkled on sauce, cheese, pepperoni, red peppers, mushrooms, broccoli... We didn't open up the artichoke hearts, amazingly enough. Amanda made a cheese-less pizza and Eleanor made a sauce-less pizza. Neither girl put broccoli on, although Amanda put peppers and prosciutto on hers. When it came out of the oven she ate the meat and the peppers, ignoring the crust. I guess a couple years of not eating bread is hard to overcome, even though she's not allergic anymore. The x-ray bananas were so that we could have the letter "x" in our "Cook the alphabet" theme: they were a magic trick where you cut the banana before you open it. The girls had a great time making up magic moves and magic words. After the trick I warned ...

We had the second day of Eleanor's cooking club today. 4 6-year olds , 2 4-year olds , 1 3-year old and 2 babies. We planned to make cinnamon rolls, trifle, and dill dip. The dough for the cinnamon rolls turned out great! North Carolina has a great climate for raising dough, the perfect humidity and temperature. We didn't quite have time and energy for making the rolls, but we made golf ball sized dough, rolled it in butter and cinnamon sugar. They got baked for a bit longer than I meant, but they were pretty good. The trifle was the most fun. We made instant pudding, cut up pound cake, and layered fruit, pudding and cake in clear plastic cups. Everyone had an excellent time. Again, the moms were key. One mom washed piles and piles of dishes, the others helped with the kids and the babies. It was fantastic to have them. In fact, one made the dill dip: the kids were running around terrorizing the neighbor boy... We've got two more. Next time we'll be making ic...