Unplugged #10: Light and Dark

As the days are getting so short here (though I suppose from now on they will get longer!), light and dark, this week's theme over at Unplug Your Kids, are always on our minds.

It actually snowed quite a bit here this week, so Bella got to play around in the light fluffy snow, and even tasted it. She gave her usual reaction of gagging, but I don't think she was sure what to spit out!

When it was nap time, I strapped Bella in the sling and went out to photograph snowflakes for my own little project.

Later on while the light was fading, we went inside to warm up in the bed, playing peekaboo in the dark under the covers.



Today we finished making all the cookies on my list, and we put the lights on the tree. What a task.



Now it's dark and stormy outside. Just to give you an idea of how unaccustomed to this weather people are, it is 11pm and there is a family just outside my window making snow men with this icy snow in the dark, when the wind chill is hovering somewhere around zero. They appear to be having a blast, and I think I'll go out and see if I can't get any photos in the dark icy blizzard. :O)

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Unplugged #9: Fluffy

Whew, these holidays are racing by at such a crazy speed. I'm wondering if I'll ever get on top of cleaning for guests, let alone getting a tree up. It helps that I decided that everyone will be getting cookies this year (so sorry to spoil the surprise, family). Baking may leave me with more to do, but the process is relaxing and the results are (usually) satisfying.

The theme of fluffy at Unplug Your Kids this week was timed perfectly, as we had 10 dozen cookies to make for a cookie exchange. Our first fluffy was to cream the butter and sugar together. Oh so white and fluffy. Our second fluffy was to make meringues, which are the definition of fluffy!

I like to make meringues anytime I make Spritz cookies, since spritz need yolks and meringues are just whites. It's a perfect match!

Here we are, all apronified together getting ready to whip up the egg whites.





Okay, white eggs in a white bowl are not so photogenic, but Bella loved watching the beater.



Here are the egg whites at "shaving cream" consistency, before we folded half of them with cocoa powder, squirted them messily onto a cookie sheet and stuffed them in the oven for 4 hours, haha. And all the while I managed to keep Bella's hands and face out of the eggy mess!


The yolky spritz dough after we creamed the butter to a most fluffy consistency.



And what Christmas would be complete without Spice Mice! Bella and I made the dough and amazingly enough, Dave decorated them! Check here to see how they turned out. :O) (and note the meringues on the back sheet)



And in case you're wondering, no cooking escapades in this kitchen are complete without some type of fiasco due to my scatter brained attention span:


After all was said and done and I was negotiating soup and cookies, I set the lid to my stock pot on a burner that was ON (!), and then had the brilliant idea to cool it off with water. Now, I KNOW that you do not pour hot water on a frozen windshield for this very reason, but I was just trickling warm water onto the edge to start the cooling process when POP!, just like a supernova, it burst into thousands of chunky little tempered pieces (which I then cleaned out of the grumpy disposal for the rest of the week).

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Unplugged #8: Kitchen

In this little apartment, the kitchen plays a huge roll. It's the hood fan above the stove that shushes Bella to sleep each night, the dishes in the sink that occupy her when she doesn't want to be put down, and the every day cooking that she assures us we couldn't possibly do without her. So of course, this week's theme of kitchen at Unplug Your Kids sounded wonderful for us!

First of all, I want to point out the wonderful interview at Chocolate & Zucchini on how the blind cook. It is so fascinating and inspiring, and makes me realize my unorganized life style would probably cause many fires, spills, burns and bumps in the kitchen. (Notice my "busy" countertops and open cabinets in the photos below.)

We tried many things in the kitchen this week, but let's just say that we managed to make our usual bread, and I even cooked up some more apple sauce, but the family kitchen project was more like a kitchen snafu.

When I get the munchies, sometimes the only thing that will kick my sweet tooth is cookie dough. Dave personally hates dough, but I can sit down and eat a whole bowl if the mood strikes. So I make dough, he makes cookies, all is well with the world.

I started with this recipe for Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies, my favorite! I subbed out the eggs with apple sauce so I wouldn't feel guilty for eating raw eggs while wearing a very grabby Bella. (Please pretend not to notice that I stay in my PJs all day when I've worked a night shift the night before...)






When all was mixed and doughy, I snuggled up with Bella and my bowl of yummy and left the rest to Dave, expecting the scrumptious smell of fresh cookies to permeate our apartment. However within a few minutes I started smelling burgers. Dave assured me that he used a clean pan and that the smell could have been from dinner, so I pushed snooze on the alarms going off in my head. But when I smelled burning just moments later, I had to check it out. As I peered in at the cookies, (sorry, I accidentally deleted the photo of them cooking!) I realized that the pan in use was in fact the broiler pan, the one dotted with handy little holes to allow the grease to fall through.

Apparently, cookies do not broil well. Little stalactites of dough were forming in each hole, occasionally releasing miniature cookie fireballs. We did our best to salvage the cookies with some tinfoil protecting the oven, but our attempts were in vain. Indeed, after much inspection, we decided meatballs had last been cooked on this tray, and the two flavors were not meant to coexist in one mouthful. There is a reason no one cooks burger cookies.

And here's our second kitchen goof up for the week: Whole wheat bread that we set to rise during our afternoon bath, but then decided that a nap sounded more appealing after a warm bath, so the bread over rose and has a splat-top.



And a peek into the normal messy status of our kitchen, in case anyone needs a little reminder that messy is normal. :O)

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Unplugged #7: Thin

Alright folks, we've been MIA on the Unplugged scene for a while, but I haven't forgotten. It's been quite busy around here and although the themes rattle around in my head all week, sometimes I can't seem to get around to a project.

So this week's theme at Unplug Your Kids is Thin. Dave and I each had our own thin cooking projects, him making baguettes and me rolling out pie crust (yay pumpkin pie!).

And then there was a more elaborate craft. The craft itself is unplugged, but the purpose is to REpurpose your TV into art. :O) So, here goes and you can all tell me how nuts I am when you finally get to the end, haha. Oh, and keep in mind this might be easier for someone with more crafting goods on hand, but all I had was a box and tape and some printer paper, so forgive me if it looks like I am reinventing the wheel at some points.


TV Light Box

First, measure the screen of your tv so that you can cut out cardboard strips to match those dimensions. (Try to find cardboard that is not brightly colored, though as you can see parts of mine were and the project still turned out fine.) You will actually be cutting pieces a little longer so that you can bend the cardboard and tape it together. The most important part of this project is that the strips of cardboard be fairly even and match in width.

Assemble the strips into a rectangular frame.

Next you will cut another set of strips (same width!) so that you can divide the box. You can choose to do as few or as many divisions as you have patience for, of course. Again, cut the strips a bit long so that you can fold it at each end as a place to put the tape. Space them apart evenly in the frame and tape them down.


When you are ready to put the horizontal strips in, hold them over the frame and mark them where they will meet the vertical strips. Cut into the vertical strips at these marks, leaving about an inch uncut.

After you have decided where to place the horizontal strips, cut into the vertical ones where each meet. You will then slide them together so that they interlock. Try to make the finished surface as level as possible, but it's really not a huge issue.

Now that you have a frame of squares, put a THIN (see, you knew we would get to the theme eventually) white sheet of paper over top. As I did not have one sheet large enough, my process is a bit bothersome. I covered as many squares as would fit entirely under a piece of paper, and then repeated the process with lots of annoying little pieces of tape for the rest of the squares.

When all is said and done, hold it up over your tv (you could tape it or hang it there if you would like it to be a more permanent fixture, of course) and turn the yammer box on. (Feel free to mute it if all you can hear are electoral commercials.)



You will find that it takes the average of each color within each block and projects it onto the thin white screen. It makes for a particularly nice effect if you happen to have a music channel on and the lights change in sync to the rhythm of the music.

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Unplugged #6: White

White, white, white. What to do with white when we're not really into colors just yet. I had the epiphany on Wednesday night while reading How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. Butter! So the result isn't white, but the cream starts out that way, and the buttermilk is pretty white in the end....

I haven't made butter since I was in Brownies (hah!), but I knew the basics from that project and my habit of squishing my whip cream (not a fan, sorry) into butter on my desert plate many-a-time at restaurants. Dave had never imagined making butter at home and he's on a from scratch kick, so we decided to give it a go. I stumbled across a great site that goes a little more in depth, though we didn't use all their advice. Not having a cow on our deck, we went to the grocery store and started with Whipping Cream. Some day I would love to try this again with reaaaal milk and reaaal cream. (Anyone got some they want to share?)

We decided to have a race: stand mixer vs. shaking a mini container (small enough Bella could get her hands around it). We set the cream on the counter for an hour to bring it to room temp.

I filled my shakey container a little over a third full, plopped a marble in there for extra agitation, and then poured the rest into my mixer with the paddle attachment I use for cookies.


At 7:35, we turned the mixer on and started shaking. As it's the smacking motion that makes butter, we tried to make sure to agitate the contents as much as possible. Bella wasn't really interested in the hands on part, but she did enjoy watching Daddy's new shaker toy.



I wasn't prepared for how quickly it worked! First, it turned to whipped cream.

Here you see the whip cream forming "soft peaks".

Then they got clumpy, and as soon as they got clumpy, they turned to butter FAST. We were done this stage by 7:45! One moment they were curdled cream, and two shakes later it was a lump of butter chilling in its butter milk.






The mixer and the shaker were neck and neck the entire time. The stuff we shook was a little too soft, so we learned from that and stopped the mixer when the butter was a little harder.

Dave's amazement at the magically appearing butter.

Then we turned out the butter into a sieve to collect the milk (scones tomorrow - if I don't drink it all tonight...) and used a spoon to squish out the excess milk, which I guess can cause the butter to spoil quickly.



We squeezed it out with a paper towel, and put it in a little bowl. Since we're used to plain butter we didn't add salt, but this is the point where you normally would. It was perfect and delicious with the bread Dave made (from scratch! see, i told you...) yesterday.


This was great fun and would definitely serve anyone's mixture of curiosity and energy. In fact, it would be a pretty spectacular project on conservation of mass- the liquid which turns to huge amounts of airy cream, and then condenses down into a solid with some remaining liquid. We didn't go that far, but it would have been interesting if Bella were a bit older to understand. Also, I would recommend using a screw top container (like a canning jar, the tupperware lid kept wiggling off) and don't forget to remove the marble because it doesn't taste good with jam!

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Unplugged #4: Sand

Another long week and I finally managed to set up our Sand project for this week's Unplug Your Kids at the last moment. On first thought, I wasn't entirely sure how we could adapt sand for a kid who is a little too young for a sand box. But, remembering the classic sand drawing pendulums at the science center, I decided to recreate one at home.


I have to admit that I am certainly not stocked for crafty activity here, but I managed okay with some yarn, paper, and tape. Bella and I went on a hunt in the neighborhood for sand and we found some on a street corner, which I promptly took home and sifted to clear out the bark mulch. The best part was that I could use my kitchen strainer and no one could complain about me taking it outside to play since it's mine and I'm the mom. Bwahahahahah!

So I rolled two pieces of paper into a funnel, threaded some yarn through holes in the top, and hung it from a planter hook on our porch. I centered a table under it, and covered a board with paper (we didn't have any poster board, but we needed the paper to be stiff) so we could see the pattern, but still dump the sand back into the funnel easily between turns.

After finding a good height for the pendulum funnel and making the hole big enough, the games began! Dave started with a pattern that looked a bit like Saturn.


Then Bella got into it and tugged at the yarn.





Then we switched and she stared at the funnel as it whooshed the sand out. She really enjoys watching faucets and things that make noise visible, so I'm sure this was right up her alley.




All in all it was a good project. Easy to do, not too time consuming, and Bella created her first artwork!

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