Homemade Challenge: Yogurt

IHC: Yogurt

You will need:

• a yogurt maker

• 1 quart of milk (if using skim, you'll also need 1/2 cup of dry milk powder)

• 1 cup of Greek yogurt

I think that all new parents go through a “quest for perfection” phase, especially when it comes to feeding their infant. Nothing impure will ever touch my baby's lips! So we reach for the organic strained peaches, the whole grain organic cereals, the gluten-free teething biscuits. For a while I made MM organic pureed millet, whatever that was.

It was during this food-saint phase that I happened to glance at the ingredient list for a six-ounce container of organic strawberry yogurt and saw that it contained 32 grams of sugar. Through a complicated system of converting grams to teaspoons of volume based on the actual food, I figured out that these 32 grams equaled 7.674 teaspoons of sugar. That's a heck of a lot of sugar, even if some of it comes from the fruit.

I know what you're thinking – can't we just go metric?

In my quest to abolish sugar from my baby's diet, I researched yogurt makers and lucked out when I stumbled upon the Cuisipro Donvier Electronic Yogurt Maker for $20 at a discount store. It has paid for itself a hundred times over; if you figure that a typical six-ounce yogurt costs 70 cents, and that to make your own eight jars costs one quart of milk plus a starter yogurt –-

I'd calculate it but V-Man took apart my calculator. Trust me, it's way cheaper.

Making yogurt is simple. The hardest part is the planning: This is a twelve-hour process, so don't start it at 3 p.m. unless you like getting up at 3 a.m. Take one quart of milk (that's two pints, or four cups, or 32 ounces, or 946.352952 milliliters). If you're using skim, add a half cup of dry milk powder to help thicken your yogurt. Heat this over LOW heat, stirring constantly. And if anyone manages to do this and NOT scald the bottom of their pan, please let me know. 

With any luck, your yogurt maker came with a dummy-proof thermometer that has lines saying things like “Add starter here” and “Hot enough! Stop!” If not, here are the temps: heat the milk to 185 degrees, then cool it in a separate bowl to 110 degrees. Little old women in Greece say that it's cool enough when they can dip their fingers in for 20 seconds. I am not a little old Greek woman, so I need my thermometer.

The cooling process should take about an hour; less if you use a cooling bath.

Then it's time to add the starter. This just means adding live cultures to your mix; i.e. yogurt. Take your cup of Greek yogurt and put at least half of it in a new bowl. Add to this a cup of your milk and whisk it so that the yogurt dissolves in the milk. Then add the rest of the milk and mix well. Transfer this to your yogurt jars. I find it works well to fill each jar halfway, then to go back around and add more mix. This way, any starter yogurt that has collected on the bottom will make it equally into all the cups.

We're missing one of the cups... it's probably in the sandbox.

Now you just set your timer  for 9-10 hours and wait... and wait. The longer it “cooks,” the thicker your yogurt will be. Still, don't expect your yogurt to be the consistency or the taste of the store-bought stuff, unless you're planning on adding sodium citrate, malic acid, cornstarch, gelatin and pectin. 

What you can add, to counteract the tartness, are a whole host of good things: jam, fresh berries, wheat germ, chopped nuts, vanilla flavoring... or, if you're out of the food-saint phase like I am, chocolate chips.

What's that? A Longhorn Beetle

This little guy, who joined our Unifix cubes for a math project on our deck, i a Longhorn Beetle. It was after we let him go that I learned that they can be serious wood-boring pests -- whoops! -- but it's highly doubtful I would have, ahem, exterminated him anyway. The Titan Beetle, a longhorn that lives in the Amazon rainforest, can grow up to 6.5 inches. Know what I would have done if he had showed up in our Unifix cubes? Yup. Turned the math project into a lesson on measurement. 

'Owl' about owls

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon the kids became enchanted by owls. We were at the library for a presentation by a local raptor rescue center, and really what the kids wanted to see were the hawks. When the presenter revealed two owls I thought the kiddos might be disappointed.

It wasn't so. Turns out they were entranced by the stories of these owls: One was blind and had wing damage from being hit by a car, and the other had opened its eyes to humans and was therefore "imprinted" to think it was a human. It never learned to hunt or behave like an owl. On the way home from the library, MM asked me, "Mommy, do you know what I want to study?" And I thought, Yeah, princesses, of course. Nope. It was owls. I couldn't get back to the library quick enough to clean out its selection of owls books.

Over a week, here are some of the owl-related things we did:

• Read about the lives of owls, especially the snowy owl and the barn owl, and painted pictures of them using templates at DLTK.

• Went on a late-night owl hunt in pajamas. 
• Went to our local science museum to visit the owls. We even saw an owl cough up a pellet just inches from us!

• Labeled the body parts of an owl using velcro-ed laminated tabs.

• Read lots and lots of books, of course.

• At the week's end, I wrote down everything the kids could tell me about owls and printed it out. Then we made a lapbook of owls using some of the materials at Lapbook Lessons.

Hoot! 

Homemade Challenge: My ice-cream maker affair

A goal for this summer was to make homemade ice cream with the kids. It sounded educational, not to mention yummy. However, this was one of those things, like dissecting owl pellets from a mail-order company, that sounded fantastic in theory but that quickly fell to the bottom of my enthusiasm pile when I looked at prices (have you checked out the prices on owl pellets lately? Wow). Anyway, when I was out running one Saturday morning I ran past a garage sale where there was an ice cream maker for $5. I begged the man to hold it from me, than I ran the last half-mile at 5:30 pace (honestly! I was kickin' it). Four minutes later I was the proud owner of a beautiful and brand new ice-cream maker.

Since then I have more than gotten my money's worth. My first endeavor was homemade vanilla ice cream. Instead of using the directions on the package I went with the more elaborate and multi-step recipe from Cook's Illustrated. It turned out beyond good. Smooth, not at all icy, and delicious.

Later that same week, I had a fridge full of blackberries. Now, we can only eat so many blackberries. What to do with the rest? Well, a quick Google search gave me a recipe for Blackberry Sorbet. I subbed one pint of blueberries (since I was overrun with those, too) and I cannot explain how good the sorbet was. I would post a picture but there is none left!

The only other thing I did differently was to pre-freeze a large metal pan and then transfer the churned sorbet straight from the ice cream maker into the pan. According to Cook's Illustrated, it helps the texture turn out less icy. Same with the ice cream.

The "What's That?" Hall of Fame

Gall on oak tree

I've discovered that I say "I don't know" quite a bit these days. What does a toucan eat? I don't know. Why do owls have yellow eyes? I don't know. And nowhere do I say it more than on our walks. It's there, outdoors, that the kids find the most confounding objects -- things that I have later come to identify, by many hours spent with guidebooks and using Google -- as various flowers, nuts, birds and insects.

The problem is I forget these quickly. One day leads into the next and suddenly we're staring again at a bug we saw last week and I'm trying to remember if that's a centipede or a millipede. So this year I've embarked upon cataloging everything we find with pictures. Here are our initial entries into the "What's That?" Hall of Fame. Pictures are below.

Used gall (I guess!)

1. Galls on an oak tree. Galls, I've learned, are the protective coverings of insect larvae, usually of small wasps. They are harmless to trees and can grow in leaves, twigs and branches. Once we figured out what these little reddish balls were we went in search of more on oaks around our street and found another gem: a used-up gall! You could see the individual larval pods (I have no idea if that's what they are actually called!) and the holes where the insects emerged. Cool.

2. Millipede. Repeat to self: Not a centipede. Not a centipede.

3. An orbweaver spider. This little guy (or girl?) has a neat spiral-weaved web attached to our house. I've watched him have a few meals, and what's really cool is that when he's nice and full his sac gets all puffed up.

4. Wasps. I don't know exactly what kind, but I suspect they are Bald-faced Hornet Wasps. They are working on a nest between our storm window and the pane (inaccessible to us, thankfully). I'm keeping track of their progression. At any given time there are two or three little worker wasps building.

Our resident wasps making their hive

Millipede (and a pillbug, for good measure!)

Orbweaver spider

Homemade Challenge: Adventures in canning

Canning fresh produce like strawberries and tomatoes has long been toward the top of my bucket list. Every spring I would think, "This'll be the year," and then after a quick Google search I'd become cross-eyed from discourses on acidity and pressure. I mean, there's a reason I'm not a physicist.

But this year I resolved that I would indeed make and preserve strawberry jam. The impetus is our subscription to a produce-delivery-service which brings all kinds of cool veggies, like kale and bok choy (actually, the kids love kale chips as long as I refer to them as "green potato chips." Bok choy -- not so much). But we also get strawberries -- fresh ones, picked the day before. Between the delivery and picking them ourselves at local farms, yesterday our fridge was sagging under seven pounds of berries. Can or rot!


So I kicked the kids out of the kitchen for safety issues (lots and lots of boiling water), put Dominic down for a nap, read through the recipe about a dozen times, took a deep breath... and an hour later I had four pints of beautiful red strawberry jam cooling in cute Mason jars.

Unbelievable.

And yes, I am totally going to make dorky red-checkered labels for the jars.

This old stump

Our yard is little, but I suppose that to insects it's pretty dang big. Recently we spent an afternoon turning over rocks, riffling through damp ivy, and checking the undersides of flowerpots for insects -- all in the pursuit of education, and not just because it was a heck of a lot of fun.

Okay, maybe it was the latter.

One of the greatest bug habitats we found was a tarp that had been cast on the ground overnight. When we pulled it up, the whole underside was covered with slugs. Delight all around.

But the piece de resistance was the old stump. About ten years ago a hurricane polished off a bunch of pine trees in our yard, and we were left with their stumps. Rather than pay to have them dug out, I figured they would decompose sooner or later. I was right! They were mushy and rotted, and -- score! -- home to all sorts of insects. The kids used butter knives and plastic spoons to chip away layers of bark. They found ants and termite larvae (kill! kill! kill!) and a bunch of other creepy crawlies, and we even kept some of them in a plastic container for the afternoon. Luckily the kids bored of "playing" with them quickly, and we ceremonially released them to return to their mommies and daddies (except the termite larvae).

And sure, I'm still missing a couple butter knives, and now instead of ugly stumps we have decimated wood chunks on which children or small animals could easily impale themselves, but was it worth it from an educational perspective?

You bet.

What's That? A Swallowtail Butterfly

Found this beautiful freshly-dead swallowtail out running with the kids at a lake. We took it to the park ranger, who delightedly added it to her collection.

Beauty is all around us.

Hunting for Inchworms

A "twig mimic" inchworm

For the past few weeks it has seemed like within minutes of venturing outdoors I am sure to hear the delighted scream of someone screeching, "Mommy! There's a WORM on your shoulder!" Terrific. They're these little green inchworms, and they seem to drop right out of trees, and they are everywhere.

Well, finally I decided to figure out just what they were, and lo and behold, they are inchworms. But what's even more incredible -- and which proves yet again just how little I know -- is that these little guys turn into moths.

Wow. I had no idea.

Inchworm Home Sweet Home

So of course we had to catch some and build a little habitat. It turns out that they're the larvae stage of the Geometer moth, geo-meter being Greek for earth-measurer, which refers to how the inchworms draw up their mid-sections to creep along the ground. Cute little fellows. Find them dropping down on silky threads from trees -- or on your shoulders.

Our habitat started out as a bona fide bug-catching glass jar with holes in the top, but we discovered that the squiggly little guys could squeeze right out the holes, and since I didn't relish the thought of finding them in the Cheerios, we recycled a plain old plastic cup with a lid and punched TINY holes in the top.
Success. And not just because they didn't escape but because I have now kept them alive for 48 hours. According to all the information I've found on the Internet (which is always correct), they eat leaves (verified -- oak leaves, preferably) and will enter the cocoon stage sometime in the near future and emerge as moths sometime in the not-so-near future. Like, November. In which case, our little critters are only going to be enjoying their new home for a few more days, because we have vacation plans coming up, and I refuse to call up neighbors and ask if they'll babysit our inchworms.

Inchworm of a geometer moth

Fish birthday cake

We have a tradition around here that grew out of me being a cheapskate my innate creativity and desire to serve my family. The birthday boy or girl (or man or woman) gets to request a cake, and I'll figure out how to make it (seriously, $55 for a silly-looking princess cake?).

Last year V-Man requested a volcano cake, and then a few days before his birthday he amended his request to an EXPLODING volcano cake (thank you, Food Network). Being the amazing mother that I am (ahem...) I managed a pretty cool exploding cake thanks to a Bundt pan, baking soda, vinegar, and food coloring. And it was even safe to eat.

We had a couple adult birthdays around here lately, one for an uncle who is an avid fisherman. So the kids suggested a fish cake, and since I didn't feel like making Nemo, I opted to make an actual fish cake. Since I quickly realized that buttercream frosting wouldn't mimic fish scales very well, I settled on tackling something I had wanted to attempt for quite some while: FONDANT. The homemade kind -- the kind that inspires any amount of horror stories.

I'll cut to the chase: It worked! No horror stories here. I found the recipe here, and it involves lots of marshmallows and powdered sugar. A few tips:

• Don't do it with kids around. Go ahead and just mark out a night after they're in bed. Otherwise it's impossible. 
• It's MESSY. VERY VERY MESSY. And sticky. But the result is downright professional.
• People will be suitably impressed whenever you can work "While I was making fondant..." into a conversation (assuming they know what fondant is). But your husband will think you're nuts for going to all this trouble for a birthday cake, and around 1 a.m. he will stare at the horrendous marshmallow mess in your kitchen and undoubtedly ask, "Why can't we just buy a cake?" Instead of screeching, "Because they're too freaking expensive!" just smile and say, "Our kids are worth it, honey." Alternatively, you can throw some fondant at him.

Frogs!

Making frog costumes

Our recent unit of study was FROGS! Jumping, hopping, kissing... what's not fun about frogs?
There's no shortage of books about tadpoles and frogs, given that frogs are the example most commonly used to demonstrate how amphibians go through metamorphosis. But we found a couple other charming books that made the kids giggle every time. I highly recommend The Frogs and Toads All Sang by Arnold Lobel, and What Did I Look Like When I Was a Baby? by Jeanne Willis. Don't worry if you can't sing the songs -- just make up any old tune. The kids don't care.

V-Man as a toad... there's something very fitting about this.

Inspired by the Frogs Sang book, we had a FROG PARTY. The kids made costumes by painting paper bags (we painted spots so V-Man could be a toad), and we drew lilypads on the deck by tracing round placemats (sneak in some counting practice here by drawing numbers in the pads). Then we made lemonade and I surprised them with a frog's favorite snack -- Ants on a Log (celery covered with peanut butter and raisins). We would have had a frog's other favorite snack -- gummy bugs -- but somebody ate them all after the kids went to bed one night...

Because MM was getting a little sick of her usual reading lesson (and so was I), I suggested she compose a story about a frog instead. She did, and we spelled it out together. I had intended to have her write an entire story, but then I realized it would take approximately three years to do so, so we didn't get further than "Starbright the frog could not find any insects. She had been hungry for five months."

The unfinished story of Starbright the Frog.

Besides, I'm pretty sure that Starbright the Frog was seconds away from meeting a handsome Frog Prince who would take her to live in his castle for ever and ever, so I'm not too disappointed in our stopping point.

Starbright on her lilypad, probably waiting for her Frog Prince

In a more academic pursuit, we spent a lot of time at the creek looking for frogs, which meant I did a lot of extra laundry, and which also meant we had a lot of wet sneakers drying on the porch. Between that and all the running strollers in the front yard, I fear our house looked a little red-necky for a while. 

Or maybe we just looked like the house of a busy, happy homeschooling family.

Ants on a log... a frog's favorite snack.

Picking up trash on the moon

The other day we were at Target (our home away from home) and V-Man saw one of those robotic picker-upper claw thingies and might as well have bowed prostrate before the aisle cap where it was displayed.

"Mommy," he breathed in that tone usually reserved for cupcakes with three inches of chocolate frosting, "do you know what that is?"

"Yeah," I said. "It's one of those robotic picker-upper claw thingies."

He gave me a look I get a lot lately, that are-you-really-that-dumb? look. "No," he corrected me. "It's what astronauts use to pick up garbage on the moon."

Oh. We bought it, of course, and a few hours later set out for a long run in the triple stroller. V-Man insisted on bringing his robot claw astronaut trash-collecting tool, and despite the high probability of it striking his little brother in the face, I let him.

One block into the run: "Mommy -- stop! I saw TRASH." From then on I stopped the stroller about every ten feet so V-Man could use his claw to pick up Styrofoam packing peanuts, crumpled receipts, plastic bags and an assortment of other gross stuff. All of it went in the bottom of the stroller. He found a lot, and with great enthusiasm hopped out of the stroller to pick up the slightest bit of trash with his claw.

It was a good exercise in keeping the earth clean, but also a good exercise for me in following the kids' lead. If I had said NO to buying the toy, NO to taking it in the stroller, NO to letting him get out and pick the stuff up, we would all have missed out on a good learning experience -- and a good time.

And it didn't hurt that we left our 6.3-mile route around the lake a little nicer than we found it.

For the birds

My grandfather used to claim that written instructions -- like for programming the VCR -- were "for the birds." He might have been right; I think the birds around here need some written instructions. We've got chickadees nesting in the bluebird box, and our cardinals, who have the perfect place to nest in these tall, private bushes on the side of our house, decided to build a nest in the triple jogging stroller.
They are now homeless. 

On our quest to attract a variety of birds to our yard, we visited Wild Birds Unlimited, which is a very dangerous place to visit with kids. Not because there are real wild birds flying around, but because they have lots of breakable bird baths and ceramic thingies in the shape of bluebirds. They also have bluebird houses for $39.99, and if I had paid that instead of $8, then I'd really be mad at the chickadee squatters. 

This is NOT the place for a cardinal nest.

Anyway, the lady at WBU was very helpful (and proved to me how very little I actually know about birds!) and explained how some birds won't be attracted to feeders full of nuts because their bills can't crack them. Others won't eat millet, since it's only for ground-feeding birds like juncos. Goldfinches like thistle, blue jays like peanuts and cracked corn, and bluebirds prefer mealworms, the freeze-dried variety of which can be plumped up by soaking in water. Sounds like the perfect job for a three-year-old.

We now have five feeders around our yard, including one just for hummingbirds. So far we've seen all the usual suspects (that's you, sparrows), but also a mourning dove, and MM swears she saw a red-winged blackbird. I think I will believe her out of hope.

Stay tuned to see what actually shows up at our feeders. For now, I'm going to check the mailbox for chimney swifts.

Bluebird, bluebird

A few weeks ago on a beautiful Sunday afternoon the family headed out to a local park to build a bluebird nesting box. Bluebirds are cavity nesters, and with the rapid development of land and the disappearance of their natural habitat, their numbers have been declining. These special boxes give them a safe, dry place to build their nests.

So we built the box, and we took it home and mounted it on a stake just like the directions instructed. We even bought a piece of PVC pipe to put around the bottom to keep snakes and other predators away.


Then we waited. That same week we saw two sets of bluebirds cavorting around the yard. We bought a book of bird calls and learned to identify bluebirds by their song. The kids did a lapbook on bluebirds.We participated in the Great Backyard Bird Count. One afternoon V-Man and I sat in a neighbor's driveway and watched the bluebirds fly in and out of the nesting box, and MM made a trail of grapes from the trees to the nesting house for the bluebirds to find their way. Soon, we thought, we'd have little baby bluebirds.

Fast-forward to this morning. The box is constructed so that one side flips open for you to keep an eye on nest-building. We tiptoed up to the box, knocked softly on the side to warn away any birds inside, and flipped open the side. And guess what? We have -----

CHICKADEES. 

Apparently bluebirds use pine straw for their nests, and chickadees use moss. Oh well. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a bird is a bird is a bird.

Off to study chickadees.

Le Salon des Refusés

I love art. I really do. Most of it. But modern art I just don't get. To me, it's an Emperor's New Clothes type-of-thing; a critic deems it worthy and the rest of the art world jumps on the bandwagon. Oh yeah! Me too! I see that now! So much of it is subjective and relies on you accepting the artist's interpretation of reality - but what's wrong with "real" reality? Like Keats said,

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

My husband and a bundle of  twigs... I mean, modern art.

A few weeks ago my husband and I had dinner at the art museum restaurant. Along the wall behind him was a massive canvas of what appeared to be twigs curled into swirls. Like my husband described it after a few glasses of wine, it looked like crows would fly out if you fired a shotgun into it.



According to our server, this is a famous piece by some famous guy and is an interpretation of Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night." What, you didn't get that? And it's not just bundles of dry twigs -- it's carefully arranged dried maple saplings (that look ready to ignite at the slightest spark).

At which point my husband asked the server if he could smoke.

In honor of this piece, I asked mes artistes en residence to create their own interpretations of "Starry Night." After ascertaining they had no idea what "interpretation" meant, here's what I got:

By MM, age 5. Memorable because this is her first work that does not contain a princess and/or a ballerina.

By V-Man, age 3. "Starry Rocketship." Most of what he "interprets" involves rocketships. 

The baby was banned from participating in this interpretative experiment because all he did was chew on crayons and spit the wax slivers onto his high chair tray. Which looked, now that I think about it, kind of like modern art.

Educational tidbit for the day: Le Salon des Refusés
Back in 1863, a bunch of revolutionary artists in Paris shrugged off the classically-accepted ideas of art. They were the laughingstock of the art critic bunch, who unanimously said nothing would ever come of these guys. They were right, of course; we know nothing today of Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro or James Whistler. When the Paris Salon, a juried art exhibition, refused to show anything but pieces that adhered to the classic forms, the emperor ruled that rejected artists could show their work next door. That exhibition became known as "le Salon des Refusés" - literally, the Salon of Rejects. 

Favorite art books:
The Private Lives of the Impressionists, by Sue Roe
Lust for Life, by Irving Stone. An eye-opening view of a tormented genius. You'll never look at van Gogh's Sunflowers the same way.
The Annotated Mona Lisa, by Carol Strickland
For fiction, Luncheon of the Boating Party by Susan Vreeland is an interesting account of Auguste Renoir as he creates one of his masterpieces

For the wee ones:
Any of the board book artist series by Julie Merberg and Susanne Bober, like this one
The Laurence Anholt series. He has books on van Gogh, Degas, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, da Vinci, and Cezanne
The "Come Look with Me" series by Gladys Blizzard