The Colorado Adventure

Jammin’

24 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by liese4 in co-ops

And not the musical kind. Last night we went to a jelly making co-op. Our guide into the journey of canning, pectin and jelly was a Mom in our HS group. She showed us the big pot, talked about sterilizing the jars and lids, showed us the pectin and let us smell the juice from her neighbors’ concord grape patch that we were using (we also used some chokecherry juice.)

We started off by boiling the jars and lids while the kids measured out the juice.

We looked at a recipe book and found all kinds of neat ideas (habenaro mango jam, yum!)

While the jars were boiling we cooked the juice and added calcium and pectin to the mix.

It boiled and everyone got a chance to stir the mixture – it smelled like grapes and cinnamon (I would venture that concord grapes mixed with chokecherries produced the cinnamon smell, or maybe the grapes had that smell in them already – whatever the case, it smelled delicious.)

After the mix started jelling up we poured it into the jars and sealed them up.

We inverted the jars and waited a a bit and then flipped them over. We headed home with 2 jars of jelly, a recipe sheet and information about canning.

The girls are excited to try this in the summer with some of the sour cherries and plums we have in the neighborhood and maybe even can something that they grow in our (soon to be) garden. Just so you don’t think this is all fun and games here is the chemistry lesson we talked about this (you can find the whole thing here): Pectin is a negatively charged hydrophilic colloid, so the following may be assumed: (1) sugar is the dehydrating agent; (2) the hydrogen-ion concentration reduces the negative charge on the pectin, thereby permitting the pectin to precipitate and coalesce in the form of a network of insoluble fibers, provided the concentration of sugar is sufficient; (3) the dehydration of the pectin micelles by sugar is not instantaneous but requires time to come to an equilibrium; (4) the rate of hydration and precipitation increases in direct ratio as the hydrogen-ion concentration; (5) the maximum jelly strength is reached when the system reaches equilibrium, and depends upon the position of that equilibrium; (6) any component added to a pectin jelly system, including salts, which causes a change in the ultimate jelly strength of that system may function either (a) by changing the rate of gelation, or (b) by affecting the ultimate jelly structure, or (c) a combination of these two.

Neat! You can find how to can and canning recipes here.

Which god or goddess are you?

23 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by liese4 in co-ops

This morning we woke up to this.

Hannah was excited because she could use her new snow boots, everyone else was wondering if our co-ops and outings were cancelled due to snow. But, the snow plow came down the street, it stopped snowing and the sun came out – so yay!

First stop the Mythology banquet.

Everyone had to dress as whatever god or goddess they wanted to be, share something about them and bring a dish to serve.

Most of the kids were Greek gods/goddesses, but a few came as Roman gods, Norse gods, Indian gods and African goddesses. There were 2 Athena’s, 2 Hermes, and a host of other characters, from L to R:

Front row – Asase Ya, Poseidon, Hera, Jormungand, Dionysus. Back row – Ganesha, Athena, Hermes, and Athena. We had 3 others come late, they were Hermes, Loki and Mars.

Here is a short list of things these gods and goddesses were known for.

Dionysus – Son of Zeus and mortal Semele. He is the god of the grape harvest and wine. Hera (Zeus’s wife) was angry at the affair and planted seeds of doubt in Semele’s mind as to the father. Zeus showed himself to Semele, which caused her to die. Zeus rescued the baby in the womb and sewed him into his thigh where he continued to grow, later Dionysus came out of his Father’s thigh as an infant.

Hermes – Son of Zeus, god of shepherds, trade and athletics. Has winged shoes and a winged helmet, delivers messages from the gods. As a toddler Hermes stole some cattle from Apollon and disguised their tracks by tying brooms onto their tails so that they would swish their tracks as they walked.

Poseidon – Greek god of the ocean, rivers, seas and horses. He sent a sea monster to punish the Trojans after they denied him payment for building their walls. He is brother to Zeus and was eaten by his father (Cronos) at birth and then thrown up.

Loki – Trickster, Norse. He is a son of the giant Farbauti and the giantess Laufey. He is regarded as one of Aesir, but is on occasion their enemy. He is connected with fire and magic, and can shapeshift.

Jormungand – A serpent like creature that gnaws at the tree of the world, Norse. He is a son of Loki and can circle round the earth to eat his tail, when he lets go of his tail the world will end.

Athena – Greek goddess who sprang from Zeus’s head fully formed. She is goddess of war, crafts and wisdom. In a contest with Poseidon she created the first olive tree. In a contest with Arakhne, where she lost, Athena turned Arakhne into a spider. Athena helped Perseus in his quest to kill the gorgon and assisted Hercules with his labors.

Hera – Greek wife to Zeus, goddess of marriage and women. She competed in a contest with Aphrodite and Athena for the golden apple and she lost. She helped the Greeks in the Trojan war and helped Jason in his quest for the golden fleece. She was very jealous, but then her husband Zeus was a ladies man!

Mars – Roman god of war and peace. He was the son of Jupiter and Juno and was thought to be the father of Romulus and Remus. The month of March is named after him.

Ganesha -Hindu elephant god who is the son of Shiva and Parvati, Ganesha has an elephantine countenance with a curved trunk and big ears, and a huge pot-bellied body of a human being. He is the Lord of success and destroyer of evils and obstacles. He is also worshipped as the god of education, knowledge, wisdom and wealth.

Asase Yaa – West African goddess of creation and the harvest. She is the mother of the gods and wife to Nyame, their son is Anansi the trickster. When people want to prove they are credible they touch their lips to her soil.

After we told our tales we headed up to eat.

There was fruit, olives, cheese, pita with meat, chicken ka-bobs, honey sesame fritters, plantain porridge, pomegranates, cupcakes, hummus, crackers and more. Here are the recipes for the porridge (we did not use crawfish), fritters and meat pitas.

Turkey pita pocket

1/2 cup minced onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1 pound ground meat (we used turkey)
2 spoons lemon juice
1/2 tspn dried oregano
1/2 tspn ground cumin
1/2 cup cucumber, diced
1/4 cup non-fat yogurt
1 tablespoon fresh spearmint, chopped
pitas
1/2 cup shredded lettuce
1/2 cup diced tomato
Oil for cooking

Add the onion and the garlic on a skillet, add some oil and cook until soft over low heat stirring constantly. Place in mixing bowl with meat, lemon juice, oregano and cumin and mix thoroughly. Cook in skillet till done. Combine cucumber, yogurt and spearmint in small bowl and mix. Cut around edge of each pita bread and pull open to form pocket. Fill each pita with half the lettuce and tomato, spoonful of meat mixture and half the yogurt mixture.

Honey sesame fritters

4¼ oz flour
½ pt water
2 tbsps honey
1 to taste oil
½ oz toasted sesame seeds

Start heating the oil.
Mix the flour, the water and one spoon of honey and make a dough.
Heat 2 spoonfuls oil in a frying pan and pour ¼ of the mixture.
When it thickens turn it upside down 2 -3 times to fry it in both sides. Prepare 3 more fritters following the given instructions.
Serve them hot, pour over the rest of the honey and dredge sesame seeds over them. (We probably tripled this recipe and added 2 eggs to it too.)

Plantain porridge

6 big green Plantains
1/2 bag of spinach
5 tablespoons full of Crayfish
1 chicken breast
2 knorr Cubes
1 medium size diced onions
5 table spoons of grounded Fresh pepper
1 table spoonful of salt
0.5 litre of palm oil. Olive or vegetable oil can be used too.

Wash your un-peeled green plantain in warm water first before you start. Holding the plantain down with one hand, cut off both ends. Remove the peel by making a vertical slit on the side of the fruit, about a quarter of a centimeter deep, just below the covering with a kitchen knife. Dip in water and allow to soak for about 5 minutes, this method is known to make the peel come off more easily. Then peel the plantain skin with you fingers or with the aid of a knife. Scrape a little part off each plantain into the pot to act as thickener. Instead, you may decide to chop about half a plantain and blend it into a paste as the thickener. Then slice the plantain into medium sized cubes and place into the cooking pot or sauce pan. Fill the pot with water till it covers the plantain slightly and bring to boil for about 10 to 20 minutes. Chop chicken breast into small pieces and add to pot. Add maggi cube, salt and pepper to taste, as well as crayfish, onions and spinach and allow to boil on medium heat for about 10 – 15 minutes. Stir occasionally. Add palm oil, stir and cover for 5 minutes. Serve hot. (We had to cook our plantain for longer than it said to get them mushy.)

Anasazi and pottery of the Southwest

22 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by liese4 in co-ops

Today was my co-op at CU Boulder’s natural history museum. We’ve wanted to do the Southwest Indian tour and workshop before, but we are only 4 people, so I stashed it as a co-op idea. Well, today we had 20 kids and 10 adults on the tour. We started in the pottery room where Jim, our guide, showed us a birch bark canoe that the museum is trying to get back to the East coast.

We obviously don’t have too many birch trees around here and really no waterways in which to put them. I get why they want to return it to the tribes to which it belonged, but it’s nice to have it here for now.

Jim toured us through the room and talked about how we can study the culture or language of people to find out about them and how archaeology is the study of people of the past. We looked at this collection of bison bones that were dug up on the eastern plains.

Archaeologists determined that about 175 bison were run off a cliff and that the Indians gathered about 63,000 pounds of meat for their village.

In the picture you can see the piles and piles of bones, they found marks on the bones from the scraping and cutting…pretty cool. We went over to the pottery exhibit and everyone got a shard of a pot to match to one on display.

It was harder than it looked. You had to look at your shard and determine: was is painted on the inside or outside? Did it have corrugated marks on it or was it smooth? Was it natural colored or black on white or white on black?

Just when some people thought they had their piece figured out Jim would tell them to look again. We sat down and Jim talked about the pots and variations, designs and color of them.

Then we went to different stations to learn more about the Ancient Ones.

There was a station to learn about what the Anasazi did for food, what crops they planted and what they hunted. Another station was about the tools they made and used for hunting and everyday life.

This station was comparing modern Pueblo pottery designs to older ones. Another station was about natural items that the Anasazi used to make clothing (plant fibers for sandals) or items like rope. Annalivia thought the stick was cool.

This station was all about homes and shelters that the Indians made, from pit houses to adobe apartments.

We took a break and then headed upstairs to the Modern Life room to make pots.

Jim told us that clay is great, but breaks easily, so the Indians used sand to make it stronger.

Indians by oceans used ground shells to make their pots sturdier, we saw an example of that kind too. Then everyone got some model magic and either formed a pot or did the coil technique to make a pot or bowl.

We got pots or bowls to decorate too.

Now the girls know that when they find clay in the river they need to add sand to it before trying to make a pot out of it. I must say though that model magic is much easier to work with than clay (and weighs less too!)

We thanked Jim and everyone went their merry way. The girls and a friend went back down to the Discovery room and checked out the animal boxes (or made snowflakes.) I forgot to mention that a front moved in today and the wind by the foothills (and thus Boulder) was strong. So strong that the turbines at the wind lab were shut down and employees were sent home, so strong that 18 wheelers were being flipped over on the freeways, so strong that not long after we left on 36, it was shut down in both directions as a footbridge over the freeway was twisted and glass and chunks of metal were tossed around. The wind around here can get gusty at times, but winds today topped out at near 100 mph, DIA closed some runways for awhile because of the wind and we drove through a rock/pebble/dust storm on the freeway as the winds blasted all that leftover grime from the last snowstorm across our van. All we got was one crack on the windshield, so I am thankful for that. But dang, I am ready for the wind to stop!

This BLM Colorado site has a ton of information about the Anasazi. If you’re ever in CO, visit the cliff dwellings at Manitou to see an Anasazi cliff dwelling. You can go inside of them, walk around, touch them, see the kiva, it’s very cool. Even better, go to Mesa Verde and see the dwellings there.

Friday

18 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment

by liese4 in co-ops

Note, Bethany had a co-op today that was about the care and keeping of you – teenager edition, so at the end of this post there will be pictures of things from the co-op and precise language of parts (we don’t use baby terms here for our anatomy.) There you were warned.

So, we dropped Bethany off and I really wanted to stay, but I had Grace and Hannah with me and the co-op was for ages 12 and up. Joel was at a flight lesson and James had something to do after he picked up Joel, so Grace, Hannah and I wandered around killing time.

First, we went to DeLaney farm and hiked around.

We saw the prairie dogs barking at us and this magpie cawing at the prairie dog and at us.

He’s looking down at Hannah who was trying to sneak up on him (unsuccessfully.)

We walked around to the round barn and checked out some more prairie dog holes, the dogs were way over on the other side at this point (smart!)

The Aurora history museum was close, so we went there next. It never fails that something that we are studying relates to an exhibit there: case in point – in the 1960′s style area (check out that shag green carpet!) there was an issue of a 1969 National Geographic.

Grace was just reading about the moon landing/space race in history and ‘poof’, here is a copy of a magazine from that era. The girls love to sit in the old desks and have me ‘be’ the ‘teacher’ at the front of the class.

I have no idea why this is so cool to them, but they just think it is crackalakin’. In another room they had a camera exhibit, although it’s kind of weird to take pictures of cameras with a camera.

Aerial cameras from planes that flew out of Lowry started the exhibit.

There were small cameras, box cameras, art deco cameras, detective cameras and more.

Back in the hands on room we had fun looking at the ads from 40 years ago, you can’t read the print on this Polaroid ad, but it actually says the new camera makes a ‘beep, boop, beep’ sound – and they thought that was a selling point.

The girls weren’t quite sure what this was, they’ve seen record players at the antique and thrift stores, but not one like this one.

This ad had them totally confused – why were they advertising about having a phone extension in your bedroom? Well, I told them, back then where would you have a phone in your house…in every room like we do? No…..probably in just one room, so it was a big deal to have a phone in another room in the house that you could use. (Grace said why couldn’t you just pick up the phone from one room to another, then she saw the green rotary phone on the table…ohhhh…)

This ad was super funny…and I quote, “Surprise her with a Ladies Electric Timex and she’ll know there’s still something electrifying between you. Not only will you make her very happy, you may make her a lot more punctual as well.” Oh yeah, I bet sparks were flying after he gave his wife that watch and told her it might make her ‘more punctual’! Always a learning experience to go to that museum.

We tooled around at the Dollar store and school store before heading back over to pick up Bethany. We got there just as they were finishing the talk about birth control. C, the mom giving the class, is an RN and a midwife and she had tons of displays and books and items to use for this class. But, one item was handmade by her just for this class. It was a vagina pillow/puppet.

Yep, there it is, vagina with cervix at the end of it, a flower to mark the urethra, labia, hair, the whole nine yards.

The girls were totally embarrassed and the moms were totally impressed.

C had 2 breast models that had lumps of varying sizes in them, you were supposed to be able to feel the lumps without looking to get an idea of what a lump in your breast would feel like.

She had a model of the inside of a woman so they could see the uterus, fallopian tubes and other parts. She had a speculum and showed how it was navigated into the opening of the vagina on the model. The girls learned about STD’s, birth control, breast exams, cancer screening, fertilization of the egg, where the egg can go after it is fertilized (like a tubal pregnancy), menstrual cycles, ovulation cycles and more.

This is a menstrual necklace (to keep at home, not to wear) the red bead is the first day of your period, the beads after are the flow, the white are fertile days and the rest of the beads are leading up to the next cycle. The main reason we (those with older girls) wanted to have this class was to make all of this information available and take the mystery out of it. Although, to me, getting pregnant is just plain magic – with everything that has to happen…I’m pretty sure it’s magic.

After we got home and had dinner we relaxed with a Sherlock, not the good one, the Jeremy Brett one, but it was okay. Tomorrow we’re off to Mardi Gras in Manitou – Carnivale!