Here and there

We have been dabbling in a few areas of late. The boys found a recipe for Rock Candy and wanted to make it. I said fine. Do you know how much sugar is in those things?? Ick Anyway they boiled some water and sugar among other things and put them in mason jars. Again when I think about the size of a mason jar and the amount of sugar I want to gag. Two of the candies did not turn out. But Conner lucked out although it took a whole lot longer than stated.

I was also concerned with how long it sat out on the counter. I mean if you leave juice or ice tea out on the counter it goes bad by the next day so I thought this can't be good to eat. What do you think? The recipe said it should be fine though. I also included a link to the recipe for those adventurous spirits. The site you will come to is absolutely fabulous and since I have a chef in the house I go to it often to see if I can make a lesson out of something we cook. What a great resource.
http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/candy/recipe-rockcandy.html
So here is our rock candy.



For our Indian history lesson we made Navajo fry bread. Honestly once I figured it out it was no hard at all. I can't believe they charge so much for what essentially is pancake batter. Ok the kind of batter we make in Germany not the fluffy stuff Americans make. I mean its eggs, milk and flour and they want to charge what for that? I think though now that we made it we won't be purchasing that anymore. We thoroughly enjoyed making and eating it. We even thought that if we piped it we could make funnel cake. That is another time though.

Here is our Navajo fry bread. MMMMMM

My boys enjoying the fruits of their labors, or rather mine since this did include frying. I don't like for them to mess with frying. You can sprinkle cinnamon sugar, powdered sugar or whatever you like. The Navajos used this like a taco and put any and all of their meal into it. In this way they didn't need utensils. My question is how did they fry it? I mean where did they get the oil and does a fire get hot enough or too hot for oil? I didn't see this in the lesson and have yet to find the answer.

Ok I'm not sure if you can tell but the egg on the left is way smaller then the egg on the right. We got these from a friend and I took the opportunity to show my kids why the egg carton is labeled medium or large or extra large eggs. It is one of those simple things that I even overlooked but once you saw an egg of a different size you could really appreciate when a recipe calls for a certain egg size. It truly would make a difference, I think.

This one is just to show you the craziness that my poor family has to put up with from me. I was at a friends house and on her counter there sat a stainless steel cookie jar. It was a small/medium size and had a glass lid. I saw that it was for composting. Now here is why this is interesting. I have had a composting bowl out on my counter for a year and it's , needless to say, very unsightly. I love being green and strive to make our household that way. So I said to myself why didn't I think of this? I mean really, I could still have my compost stuff handy till it is ready to be taken out to the bin but it would have to look ugly. We were at the store and I had told hubs about it and he found this trash can. Its fantastic because it has a plastic insert that comes out so when it's full the kids can pull the insert out to empty into our bin outside. Yes this is the craziness of me. LOL.

Vanessa