Giant Bearded Irises

They say that April showers bring May flowers.  Although most of April was pretty dry this year, we did have our fair share of rainy days towards the end.  Here are some of the beautiful May flowers that have come forth.   These are all pictures of the annuals growing our yard.  An added bonus is that the chive flowers make a spicy, but tasty, addition to a salad.

Snow Drops

Chives

Azalea

Purple Cups

Violets - Rhode Island State Flower

Bleeding Hearts

Red Tulip

White Phlox

Lily of the Valley

Blue Bells

Irises

Hello!

Yes, I realize it has been more than 52 weeks since we started this project, but we (being Deirdre, Jonah, and myself) have magnanimously granted ourselves an extension.

Our latest virtual trip has been to the nation of Japan, home of everyone’s favorite anime character – Hello Kitty.  We began our adventure by reading a great book from our library which described in  detail the various types of clothing, customs and housing in Japan over the past several hundred years.  The kids were particularly fascinated with how typical dress varied depending upon one’s occupation or station in life.  Really, who wouldn’t be fascinated by a gorgeous silk kimono and obi?

Vegetable Sushi - Yum!!!

For the culinary part of the adventure, we made homemade sushi, teriyaki salmon & veggies, miso soup and rice.  I found a really neat little sushi kit by Annie Chun which made it so easy to roll the sushi.   Honestly, I thought the kids would be a little bit more excited about making sushi rolls, but apparently, I was wrong.   However, they did down their bowls of miso in a matter of minutes.

Maneki Neko Cat - Spread The Luck

One of the highlights of this lesson was learning about the Maneki Neko welcoming cat.  This kitty has his paw raised to let people know that they are welcome into your home or shop.  You can read the legend of Maneki Neko at ActionCat. The good people at Action Cat suggested adding a link to an animal rescue group to continue the gift of the welcoming cat.  I suggest you check out Best Friends Animal Society.  You can also color your own Maneki  the Coloring Castle.

Finally, for our craft, we were inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and decorative fans.  We decided to use stamps and water color paints to decorate plain paper with vines, flowers, and even a few dinosaur pictures!  We intended to fold the paper into fans and tie the bottom with a ribbon.  But, since they didn’t come out as we expected, we ended up cutting our decorated paper into strips and making these cool book marks!

Next trip, we will venture to Kenya!

Many thanks to my aunt, Carole Hamilton, for solving the mystery of the feral squash.  As it turns out, I was on the right path from the get-go.  My mysterious vegetable was, in fact, a pumpkin  — a Long Island Cheese Pumpkin to be exact.  Carole sent me a link to this great site which identifies late season squash so you can see for yourself.  I’m thrilled to actually know what I’ve been eating.  These guys were so good, we are going to save the seeds and try to grow some more Long Island Cheese Pumpkins next year.  If all works out, I’ll send the first ripe one up to Carole!  Time to start making room in the fridge!

With two of the remaining segments, I’m making “Roasted Winter Root Vegetables”  with dinner tonight.  I tweaked the recipe a bit, and this is what I’ve come up with:

Roasted Winter Root Vegetables

• 2 cups winter squash cut into 1″ cubes
• 2 large carrots cut into 1/2″ segments
• 2 red potatoes cut into 1″ cubes
• 3-4 sprigs of fresh rosemary
• 4 tablespoons of olive oil
• salt & pepper to taste

Heat oven to 450 degrees.  Mix all ingredients in a casserole dish.  Cover dish.  Bake until vegetables are tender.  Remove cover for last 10 minutes.  Approx. 35 minutes total cook time.

Mystery Squash

If you read my Feral Pumpkin post, you know that I was convinced that I had giant pumpkins growing out of my compost.  Well, now that fall is here, nature has proven me wrong.   What I thought were pumpkins turned out to be some type of huge, unidentified winter squash.  We ended up with four of these beauties.  They are about 12-15 inches across, kind of squatty, and have the same beige color as a butternut squash.  Honestly, I can’t figure out what they are.  I described them to one of the farmers at the Farmer’s Market, but she wasn’t quite sure either, although she was quite certain that they would be good eatin’!  If you have ANY idea what kind of squash these are, please let me know!

Identified or not, we are planning on eating them all.  Here are a few of the yummy recipes I plan to check out:

• Squash Pie
• Squash Soup
• Roasted Winter Vegetables

!!!!UPDATE!!!!

Here is a photo of what one of the super-squash looks like after being opened up.  So far, I’ve made enough soup for three meals, made 2 pies, and froze enough boiled squash for 2 more pies.  Oh, yeah, that only accounts for 1/2 of one squash.  We still have the other 1/2 in the fridge and one more waiting to be eaten.  We gave the others away to be enjoyed by others.  Not too bad for something that spontaneously came out of the compost bin!!!

Cross Section of Our Super-Squash

Here are some more pics of Deirdre and Jonah enjoying their harvest:

Deirdre's Feat of Strength

Jonah Just Hanging Out

The Feral Pumpkin

Since I was laid up for a good part of the spring with Lyme Disease, I really didn’t put that much effort into our vegetable garden this year.  We threw in some peas, beans, tomatoes, potatoes,  various squashes, and a variety of herbs, but no one bothered much to weed, or even water, for that matter, early in the season.  Once I had the energy to actually give my plants a helping hand, I noticed a thick, green vine with huge leaves creeping out of the compost bin.  Actually, it was more like charging out of the bin, at full force.  I knew it was some type of squash plant by the leaves, but wasn’t exactly sure what kind of squash it might be.  As the summer went on, this plant (well, two plants to be completely accurate) took over an entire corner of the yard.  In fact, one of the tendrils even managed to rip off a side of the compost bin!

This Voracious Vine Tore Off the Compost Bin Door

Jack and his Beanstalk be damned, here comes my feral pumpkin!  The leaves were about 4 times the size of the leaves on my zucchini, summer squash and spaghetti squash.  But, for all the effort it was putting into its amazonian foliage, there was no fruit to be seen.  Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I spotted a small squash that has turned out to be a pumpkin.  Its now about the size of a soccer ball, and still going strong.  And, this morning, I noticed another little pumkin-let growing on another tendril.  I’m crossing my fingers that by Halloween, we have a nice crop of feral pumpkins to carve into Jack-o-lanterns!  I will certainly post a picture, if we do!

Twenty Five Feet of Pumpkin Vines

Since we seemed to get REALLY behind schedule with our ’round the world project we decided to cover Guatemala and Honduras together, mainly because they are close both geographically and alphabetically.  We were able to check out a couple of really good books from the library with a lot of wonderful pictures.  Deirdre was particularly enchanted with the colorful outfits worn by many of the Guatemalan girls in the book.  We spent most of our time talking about the wildlife indiginous to these countries.  The kids were especially interested in looking at pictures of jaguars, toucans, blue morpho butterflies, and sea turtles.  The kids also decided that Diego might live in this area since these seem like the animals that he hangs out with!  This gave us a good opportunity to talk a little bit about wildlife conservation and sustainable farming practices which wasn’t exactly what I intended but was covered in the book.  Not a bad lesson to learn!

For our project, we made worry dolls.

Our Worry Doll Family

Legend has it that Guatemalan children would make these worry dolls out of scraps of thread and fabric.  At night, they would tell a ‘worry’ to each doll, and the doll would help make that worry disappear.  Here are some basic intructions to make your own!

Materials Needed:

1. Twist ties
2. Yarn
3. Fabric Scraps
4. Marking Pen

Instructions:

1. Bend twist-ties into basic T-shape for your doll’s body
2. Fold a piece of fabric over the top of the “T” for the head
3. Wrap yarn around the neck to secure head; wrap yarn around body, arms, and legs.
4. Tie on a dress or serape
5. Use marking pen to draw on a face

Step 1 - Bend Twist Ties

Step 2 - Add Fabric Head and Cover with Yarn

Step 3 - Add Clothing

Step 4 - Add Faces!

For our snack, we tried making dulce de leche cookies.

Dulce de Leche Cookies -yum!

Although not specifically Guatemalan or Honduran, they are still somewhat regional.  (we substituted corn flour for the corn starch). What did I learn?  Dulce de leche is REALLY hard to make.  Seriously, you need to stir it for, like, 3 hours.  The cookies came out tasty, but we probably won’t be making them again.

Next stop, by popular demand, India!

Eating our Home Made Ice Cream

Did you know you can make tasty homemade ice cream using plastic ziploc bags, soy milk, sugar, salt and ice?  Whether you are digging yourself out from “Snowpocalypse” or trying to beat the summer heat, you have to try this improbably easy and delicious recipe.   I saw a similar recipe in Highlights magazine a few months back and having been waiting for a chance to give it a try.  It was really fun to make and even more fun to eat!  Here are the basic instructions:

You Will Need:

• 1/2 cup flavored soy milk (we used chocolate and vanilla)
  

  Ingredients for Home Made Ice Cream

• 1 tablespoon sugar
• Ziploc bags in 2 sizes (we used sandwich size and quart size)
• Ice cubes (approx 2 cups)
• 5-6 tablespoons salt

Directions:

1. Pour the soy milk into the smaller bag.  Squeeze out the air and zip it shut
2. Fill the larger bag about 1/4 – 1/3 full of ice
3. Sprinkle the salt over the ice in the bag
4. Put the small bag of soy milk into the larger bag
5. Add ice on top of the bag of soy milk (leave about 1/4 of the bag empty)
6. Zip the large bag shut
7. SHAKE the bag for about 5-10 minutes until soy milk is the consistency of soft serve ice cream
8. Carefully remove the small bag and wipe off any water or salt on the outside of the bag (so that you don’t have salty ice cream)
9. Put into a bowl and eat!

Here is an action shot of the kids shaking their ice cream.  To make the shaking part more fun, we put on some Irish music on Pandora and danced a little jig while shaking it up.

Dancing a Jig While Making Ice Cream

Science Question – Why do you need salt to make ice cream?  According to WikiAnswers ,”Ice water is only 32 degrees F, and ice cream needs to be much colder to properly freeze. The salt lowers the freezing point of the water. The super cold water is what will actually freeze the ice cream. You can actually get the temp of the liquid water down to about 10 degrees F.”

We Love Ice Cream!

Welcome to Australia!  When the kids chose Australia as our first place to visit, I was a little unsure of where to start, since I hadn’t really thought through the “lesson plan” of the project.

Aborigine-inspired Dot Painting

I decided the easiest thing to do would be give the kids a basic overview of the country and see what interested them most.  We could take it from there.   Since I decided that we would not be using the internet as our sole source of info, we hopped in the car and headed over to the library.  This, in itself, was actually a great educational experience since it was the first time we actually had to use the dewey decimal system to find specific books. (usually, we just browse the shelves for kid’s stories).  We found a great book on Australia which highlighted all the basics like geography, resources, industry, population, etc.  As it turned out, they were most interested in aborigine lifestyle, local animals, and food.  I guess imports/exports, industry and geography just don’t cut it with the preschool set these days.

Honestly, they were fascinated by anything to do with the aborigines’ culture.  We checked out kids’ crafts for an Aboriginal Mask and Aboriginal Snake Painting, but in the end, we decided to do an art project inspired by the aboriginal dot paintings.  This ended up being one of the coolest projects we’ve done, and I’ve outlined the instructions below.  We talked about how the paintings represented something in nature or told a story in lieu of written books.  I like Deirdre painting the best — she said it is a mother snake with eggs and newly hatched baby snakes.  Jonah make Tuck the Turtle from the Wonderpets (basically, everything he does these days involved Tuck or Diego).

Then we listened to some didgeridoo music, and they managed to find some pretty funky Didgeridoo Trance/Beatbox which, although not traditional, was totally fun.  We tried making cardboard tube didgeridoos, but then Jon made some out of PVC pipe which sounded a hell of a lot better!

As for the wildlife, we read a book on marsupials, another book on snakes, and watched some you-tube video of sharks.  As luck would have it, I found a movie on-demand about a boy who rescued a joey, which fit in perfectly with our theme.

Yummy Meat Pie!

On Thursday we decided to cook an Australian inspired meal. (no, we did NOT go to Outback Steakhouse).  Jon found a website with recipes from around the world, and we decided to make Australian meat pie and apple/carrot salad.  We topped of the meal with cookies shaped like kangaroos (once again, not traditional, but the kids thought up the idea by themselves).

All and all, a good start!  Next…Bangladesh.

———

Directions for Dot Paintings

Materials

1. Cardboard or wood
2. Acrylic paint
3. Q-tips (at least one for each color)

The Artists Hard At Work

Process

• decide what you would like to paint, such as a scene from nature, abstract design, or story image
• dip Q-tip in a darker color and outline the image you would like to paint.  Use a straight up and down motion to get a round dot
• dip Q-tip in a different color and fill in your object with dots
• use your dots to create different designs in the background
• when the paint has dried, you can go back with a different color and add features (eyes, mouth) to your images or more details to your abstract designs