Flower Unit Celebration

We like to have a unit "celebration" when possible at the end of units…we used to only do it sometimes, but the children have been insisting on it more and more lately. For our Flower Unit Celebration we basically just made some flower-ish foods and called it good. It was exciting enough because I let them decorate cakes, and they love decorating cakes! 

We made rose petal jelly, lavender and rose syrups, and sugared flowers for the tops of the cakes. All easy, and all beautiful!

Rose Petal Jelly 

1 cup edible rose petals 

1 1/2 cups water 

juice of 1 lemon 

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar 

1 package Sure-Jell pectin 

Combine the rose petals, 3/4 cup water and lemon juice in a blender. Blend until smooth. Slowly add the sugar and blend well. 

Bring the remaining 3/4 cup water to a boil in a small saucepan. Stir in the pectin and boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly. 

Pour the hot mixture into the blender with the other ingredients and blend 1 minute. Pour into sterilized jars and seal. 

Rose Petal Drink

Petals from 3 full-bloom roses

5 cups water

1/2 tsp. lemon juice

3 tbsp. sugar

Instructions

Boil water. Add rose petals and lemon juice to the boiling water, turn off heat and let stand for 6-10 hours. 

Drain into a pitcher. Discard petals. Add sugar to the rose water and stir. Let cool in the refrigerator or freezer. Serve.

We made syrups with rose petals and lavender (we had to buy the lavender since we didn't have it in our garden at the time)—they are easy; here is one recipe. You basically just boil sugar and water with rose or lavender petals until it concentrates into a syrup. They look so pretty!

And then we used the syrups to make Italian Cream Sodas. So good!

For sugared flowers, you blend up sugar in the blender to make superfine sugar. (It becomes almost powdery, but it doesn't have the cornstarch or whatever it is they add to actual powdered sugar.) Then you dip/paint each petal in egg white, sprinkle on the sugar, and let them dry. They look so pretty and taste so flowery and sweet! We used rose petals, violets (I don't know how we had violets growing in the fall! But we did!), day lilies, and mint leaves.

Then we made two cakes (orange juice cake and angel food cake) and let Daisy and Goldie decorate one and Teddy and Junie decorate the other. They loved doing that!

Revolutionary War Unit Food

Another Liberty Tea Party—with various herbal teas, and a delicious "colonial" pound cake!

Here is the recipe for the pound cake. Since I am finding that many of these links end up broken after several years, and I LIKE this pound cake recipe, I will reproduce it here (it's already in my recipe book):

1 cup butter
3 cups sugar
1 cup sour cream
1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda
3 cups all-purpose flour
6 large eggs
1 -2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 325.
Cream butter and sugar together with your heavy-duty mixer.
Add the sour cream and mix thoroughly.
Sift baking soda and flour together.
Add the flour to the creamed mixture, alternating with one egg at a time (about 1/2 cup of flour each time).
Mix well after each addition.
Add the vanilla and mix well.
Spoon the mixture into a well greased and floured 10 inch tube or bundt pan.
Bake for 1 hour and 20 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in cake tests COMPLETELY clean.
Let cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes.
Invert cake on wire rack, removing from pan and let cool completely.

Things to mention while making the cake:

• Pound cakes became popular in the 1700's.

• Why might they be called pound cakes? Original recipe: 1 pound cake flour (3-1/2 cups), 1 pound butter (2 cups), 1 pound sugar (2-1/4 cups), & 1 pound eggs (9 large).

• We have changed the recipe because we would find this cake dense and not as tasty.

• To make less dense, we add a leavener, which helps things rise. Here we're using baking soda.

• This would have been a very special treat because it used sugar instead of molasses and sugar was very expensive.

We also made Indian Pudding (or Hasty Pudding) one day, which you can find the recipe for here or here. This time we made it in the Instant Pot, which is a great way to cook cheesecakes or puddings. You just wrap the dish securely in foil to keep the water out. Add 1 cup of water to the pot and place the wrapped dish on top of the trivet. Cook on the Manual setting for 30-45 minutes.

And another day, we tried making Maple Cream candy. I didn't love it, but maybe we didn't make it quite right? Anyway the children were happy enough to eat it. Instructions here.

Last time we did this unit, we read a book that told about "Thomas Jefferson's Vanilla Ice Cream." We didn't have that book this time, but we did find the same recipe from Thomas Jefferson on the Monticello website. It's even in his own handwriting! So cool! It made good ice cream, too. We thought it was pretty similar to our usual vanilla bean ice cream, if maybe slightly less sweet.

Here are some other colonial recipes (or "receipts") we had fun looking at, too. 

We found this list of table manners for colonial children (these were written by George Washington) and thought they were pretty great:

“Never sit down at the table till asked, and after the blessing. Ask for nothing; tarry till it be offered thee. Speak not. Bite not thy bread but break it. Take salt only with a clean knife. Dip not the meat in the same. Hold not thy knife upright but sloping, and lay it down at right hand of plate with blade on plate. Look not earnestly at any other that is eating. When moderately satisfied leave the table. Sing not, hum not, wriggle not. Spit no where in the room but in the corner..."

"Eat not too fast nor the Greedy Behavior. Eat not vastly but moderately. Make not a noise with thy Tongue, Mouth, Lips, or Breath in Thy Eating and Drinking. Smell not of thy Meat; nor put it to Thy Nose; turn it not the other side upward on Thy Plate."

Egyptian Feast and Treasure Hunt

This celebration was so much fun. While planning it, I found so many awesome ideas that I DIDN'T want to do (complicated/expensive/time-consuming)—elaborate parties like this—but I had a lot of fun browsing around anyway. And luckily, I was able to compile enough fairly simple things from those resources, that we were able to have a great time! You can find a lot of the ideas we didn't use on my Pinterest Board.

The children dressed up in Egyptian costumes and wore all their jewelry (well…the girls did, anyway). And here was our menu (complete with totally inauthentic "hieroglyphs" and lame "Papyrus" font):

We love hummus and I make it fairly often, but anytime I run out of tahini, it takes me a long time to get again since I often don't see it at the regular grocery store. So, I was happy to find this recipe for hummus without tahini. I think I just needed…permission, or approval, or something, to do this. Because it's perfectly fine without tahini! Really good, in fact! I put in some sesame oil to see if I could get some of that sesame taste back, and I think a little peanut butter might also be good…or even sesame seeds!

The "yogurt Thoth" is just a joke for the older boys because they always joked that the god Thoth sounded like someone trying to say "sauce" with a lisp. Really it was labneh (sort of like a really thick yogurt cheese?), which we love almost as much as hummus with our pita bread. Or naan. Yum!

And Pie of Horus! My own invention! Not the pie, just the name. I had been wanting to make a pink lemonade ice cream pie and this celebration night seemed just the time. I was very pleased with myself for calling it Pie of Horus, as it seemed to strike just the right note. Ha ha.

It really was a most lavish feast! And I even got gold plastic plates for the occasion. So fancy!

But the very BEST thing I did for this party was have Abraham (my 14-year-old) be in charge of a treasure hunt. I knew we should have some sort of hunting-for-ancient-treasure activity, and Abe is so great with that sort of thing! He made it so fun, with coded hieroglyphs and riddles in the clues, and the younger kids LOVED it.

Hunting for treasure!

Totally clueless. But thrilled.

Abe hid the treasure-filled sarcophagi in the shed.

Inside, I had wrapped up stuffed animals like mummies, in toilet paper. (This was quite fun to do. You have to be really gentle with your wrapping or it will tear, but I found it strangely satisfying.) I drew faces on the front of them, like you'd find on a sarcophagus.

Each person's favorite animal! Oh…you can't tell what they are? Ha ha. I should have had Sam draw them. Penguin, elephant, monkey, bear, pig, owl.

I had used a gold-foil tablecloth to wrap up these "sarcophagi" made from cardboard boxes, with appropriately dire warnings for those who disturbed the treasure. If you can't do this during your Ancient Egypt Unit, when CAN you do it? One of the boxes was also filled with gold chocolate coins, and other candy "jewels." The children thought it was all so exciting and fun!

And then we watched "Prince of Egypt" while we ate our pie. It was a great end to our Ancient Egypt Unit!

Insect Unit Celebration

At the end of our unit, I decided we ought to use a few of the MANY cute ideas I'd seen online, and have an insect-themed celebration. It always seems like a lot of work to do these things, but since it's for school and the children like it SO much, I usually manage to muster up the motivation.

For decorations, we made these cute pleated butterflies. We worked on them together while we were watching some insect video (I think it was this one) earlier in the day, and they went really fast and took relatively little effort. You don't even really need the template, once you get the hang of it. And they looked really cute fluttering around on the windows. It would have been cute to put them on some sort of garland, but the way they were weighted made that seem tricky.

I would have also liked to make these butterfly balloons my friend Tia made for her daughter's birthday—but somehow I never got around to it!

We had a Honeybee-themed dinner to go along with one of our units a couple years ago, and we honestly could have just made all the exact same foods this time and been happy! (I think this Honey Panna Cotta was our favorite.) We decided we wanted to try some new things anyway, but you can find some more bee-specific ideas at this Pinterest board.

Here's what we ate at our celebration.

The caterpillar skewers were just fruit on a skewer. I drew in the eyes and antennae to give the general idea, ha ha. You could obviously make this better by using frosting or chocolate chips or what have you to make actual faces, but my kids mostly just wanted to eat theirs.

Here's how to make the little Babybel cheese ladybugs. We used a paring knife to trim the red wax into the right shape, and then an edible-ink pen to draw on spots. We also did some spots by punching out holes with a tiny straw, which I thought looked quite cute:

And then we stuck in toothpicks for legs. Seb also made probosces on some of his. :)

We made an Italian pasta salad using butterfly noodles, and then to go with that, we made these little mini corndogs which I liked because they were such a good model for a moth or butterfly. The hotdog is like the caterpillar; then you cover it with batter which is like the cocoon. When you deep-fry it, it hardens (again like the chysalis or the cocoon). Then to serve it, you stick some triangular chips into the side and it becomes a butterfly! :) Cute!

I ended up burning myself pretty severely while Abe and I were deep frying these, which rendered my hand useless for the rest of the evening, but luckily most everything was made by then and the kids could do the rest. I've never made corndogs from scratch (? well, not the hot dog part of course!) before, but it isn't hard. Just a quick stir-together corn batter and then the deep frying (use caution! Grabbing the wrong end of the tongs was my downfall). There's a recipe here.

These pretzel butterflies were really fun to make, although they didn't turn out nearly as smooth and nice as the ones we copied! We just melted white chocolate wafers (with a few drops of food coloring to color it), stirred, and poured into a squeeze bottle, then squeezed the melted chocolate into the spaces of the pretzels. They hardened quickly and they were really yummy. Here is another similar idea using fruit roll-ups that we considered.

We have liked Italian Sodas ever since we discovered them several years ago, so it was a simple matter to call them nectar sodas and add them to the menu. :) I wish we still had those rose and lavender syrups we made back then!

Abe took a picture of the final spread (as my hand was otherwise occupied in a bag of ice at that time) and it did look quite nice! I had ordered these edible crickets from Amazon in three flavors, so we ate those too. Everyone quite liked them, even Teddy, who kept yelling "KIKKET! More KIKKET!" with great enthusiasm. They don't really taste like anything except just the flavoring that's on them, and you get a nice little light crispness as you crunch into them. Not bad at all. And after dinner we watched "Valley of the Lost Ants" (though it could just as well have been "A Bug's Life") and we all considered it quite a satisfactory ending to this Insect Unit!

History of Flight, and Angel Food Cake with Pink Clouds

There are so many cool elements of the history of aviation! All the way from Icarus to Chinese kites to hot air balloons to the Wright Brothers to Amelia Earhart. There is a good overview here, but I think the best way to learn about it is just to get books and books and books from the library. There are SO many good ones! About all kinds of different aviators and all kinds of different flying machines.

We had previously learned about hot air balloons, which are a fascinating subject all by themselves. It would be fun to do some of those activities when talking about the history of flight. There are probably also some activities from our Bird Unit that would apply.

This was a funny video showing some flying machines that didn't work so well!

Here's a clip of the Wright Brothers flying their plane!

The children, even the older ones, had a lot of fun doing some of these historical aircraft dot-to-dots.

We watched this interesting documentary about Amelia Earhart's disappearance.

One of the books we read was called Eleanor and Amelia Go for a Ride, based on a true event where Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt flew together on a plane. There was a recipe at the end for "Eleanor Roosevelt's Angel Food Cake with Pink Clouds." An appropriately aero-centric treat! :) We made something similar, but I used my tried-and-true angel food cake recipe. The "pink clouds" are just blended up strawberries, folded into whipped cream. It was SO good!

Here's the recipe:

Angel Food Cake with Pink Clouds

1 1/2 c. egg whites (10-12), at room temperature
1 1/2 c. sugar, divided
1 c. sifted cake flour
1 tsp. cream of tartar
1/4 t. salt
2 tsp. vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
1/2 t. almond extract

In a small bowl, whisk together 3/4 c. sugar and cake flour. Set aside.

Beat egg whites in stand mixer until frothy, then add cream of tartar and salt. Beat until fully mixed, and then add the remaining 3/4 c. sugar, 1-2 T. at a time. When sugar has been added, beat egg whites to soft peaks. (They will look like soft waves, and when you lift the beaters, the egg whites will droop back down into the batter---not fall down in ribbons.) Once you have soft peaks, add vanilla and almond and beat for a few seconds to distribute.

Sift the flour/sugar mixture over the egg whites in 6-8 additions and gently fold it in after each addition. Do it with a spatula and be very slow and gentle so as not to deflate the eggs.

Spoon batter into a 9-inch tube pan with a removeable bottom. Smooth the top with a spatula and bake in the lowest half of the oven, at 325 for 55-60 minutes.

Remove from oven, invert pan over a bottle, and allow to cool completely. Gently run a thin knife around the sides, then around the bottom, of the pan to release the cake when you are ready to serve it. Slice with a serrated bread knife, and serve with berries, "pink clouds" or lemon curd.

"Pink Clouds":

Blend 6-8 strawberries, fresh or frozen, to make a thin berry sauce. Fold sauce into freshly whipped cream.

Oh—also—we saw this IMAX movie about the history of flight. And it was good. We wish there had been more planes in it, though. (There was lots of just scenery. Beautiful, but the airplanes were cooler.) The part that showed a bouquet of roses, making their way from Africa (or Ecuador? or somewhere) on various planes to finally end up on someone's bedside table in Alaska was our favorite part. We loved seeing that truly miraculous journey with new eyes.

Japanese food: gyoza, tempura; "Kawaii cooking;" teppanyaki-style food

One night we decided to try making gyoza, which are the Japanese version of potstickers. We LOVE to eat potstickers, so we were pretty sure we'd like making them too.

I adapted this pork gyoza recipe, but now that I've made them once, I think it would be pretty easy to make up our own filling using cabbage and other vegetables, or adding some other type of meat. Apparently even the restaurants in Japan don't usually make their own wrappers, so we bought some of the round pre-made wrappers at the store and that made it easy. It always takes a while to fill so many little dumplings, but it's fun to do, and we got the hang of the pleating pretty well after a while. They turned out really quite delicious.

Our very favorite thing about studying Japanese food (besides eating it) was when we learned about the sampuru, or plastic food samples, often used in Japanese restaurants. These food samples are so realistic and delicious-looking that Japan is famous for them! I've even seen them at a ramen restaurant we went to in California one time. There is a cool introduction to the food samples here, and also a fascinating video here. You have GOT to watch the man form cabbage by dropping sheets of warm wax into water, and then folding it together and slicing it. It is AMAZING!

Anyway, one of the most popular food samples to make is tempura shrimp. So we decided to try making that, too. I have never shelled and de-veined shrimp before, but I asked the man at the meat counter to show me how, and he did, so now I can do it! The children helped me. We made tempura shrimp and also tempura vegetables, and everything was delicious. We used this recipe here for the batter and some miso mayonnaise dip (very yummy).

On another day, we talked about the Japanese concept of "kawaii," which basically means "cute," but has other implications as well (see a discussion of "kawaii" here). We watched some episodes of THE CUTEST YouTube show, called "Kawaii Cooking," which shows you how to make all sorts of impossibly tiny and edible things. They are adorable. Our favorite was probably this one showing tiny donuts.

While we were making gyoza, Sebastian decided he wanted to make a "kawaii gyoza." So he did:

Eeek! The tiniest!

Our own Japanese food was delicious, but I must admit it is not as good as food prepared by real Japanese chefs who know what they are doing! We got to go to a Japanese tepanyaki-style restaurant (called Bonsai Japanese Steakhouse; we recommend it; it's awesome) and we were amazed at how good everything was! 

Incidentally, lots of people (including the owners of this restaurant, so it must be acceptable) call this type of restaurant a "hibachi" steakhouse, but we learned that this isn't quite correct: a hibachi is a small grill with a grate, usually not even used for cooking in traditional Japanese homes, but just for heat. Teppanyaki is the correct name for the big griddle that they use at these places. Maybe since there's also an actual restaurant called Tepanyaki, it's just too confusing to call it that?

Anyway, Sam and I have been to a Tepanyaki and also to a Benihana (same kind of place) and we think this restaurant, Bonsai, is the best of all of them. We loved it. And of course the children loved the onion volcano and all the other antics of the chef. It was a really fun place to go (for a special occasion—it is not as expensive as Benihana, but still not cheap).

Homemade Sushi Party

Before this unit, I had only tried sushi a few times. I liked it okay, but I didn't really…get it. It seemed faintly strange to me, and I worried about the raw fish, but mostly I just didn't see what the fuss was about and I felt like maybe I was missing something.

MAKING our own sushi somehow transformed it into a food that I understood! Putting all the components together myself made me realize how many variations in taste and texture sushi can utilize, and I realized that "sushi" wasn't just one thing, but a whole class of food that could be adjusted to suit almost any taste. It just suddenly made sense. 

I think the other thing that helped me understand it was just seeing in videos how carefully and lovingly Japanese chefs prepared their sushi. I saw what an art form it was and began to appreciate the visual and creative elements. Two videos we really liked were this one on the history of sushi, and this Begin Japanology episode on sushi. And then seeing, in those same videos, people enjoying and relishing their sushi so greatly, helped me get over the hump of feeling like it was a strange food, and just feel more like, "Wow, so many people like this and think it's delicious…I want to try it too!"

Oh—and it also helped when I learned that each piece of sushi was supposed to be eaten in one bite. I can't always manage that, of course, but I think the first few times I had sushi I just felt so awkward eating it, because it fell apart or I couldn't quite get it with the chopsticks. But when I looked at each piece as an entity meant to go together, where all the flavors were supposed to join and make one multi-layered taste, I was more willing to just stuff it into my mouth and enjoy that deep blend of flavor. And not worry about if it was messy or if I looked silly. :)

The children didn't have any preconceived notions about sushi, but they loved all the other Japanese food we'd tried, and they had seen all the same videos where it was made to look so delicious, so they were all excited to try it. Their absolute favorite thing, though, was this video we watched about conveyor belt sushi restaurants in Japan. They LOVED the idea of getting your food from a conveyor belt, right at your table! It's too bad we don't have restaurants like this around here because they would have been overcome with joy to go to one.

Failing a conveyor belt restaurant, though, making our own sushi was the next best thing, because everyone could prepare theirs just as they liked it. We had our friends the Rhodes come over and help us. They had mats for us to use for rolling, and Carrie Ann brought the most beautiful platter of fillings (is that what they're called?). Mango, cucumber, carrot, lemon, lime, avocado, cilantro, cream cheese. She arranged them into darling little fish and turtle shapes, which is so Japanese in spirit. It was perfect. I got our fish, tuna and salmon, from a Market Street Grill (restaurant) and had no concerns about its quality, and once I tasted how delicious it was in the sushi, I wasn't concerned about it being raw, either. It was so great to have the Rhodes with us because they knew what they were doing, and helped show us so we could feel confident too.

The rice was easy to make. We used what was called "sushi rice" at our grocery store. Before cooking it, I made sure to rinse it several times until the water was clear, and I followed the directions on the package, which were a little different than the usual 2:1 water to rice ratio. (It was 2 cups water to 1 1/2 cups rice.) Then Carrie Ann told me to add, for every two cups of uncooked rice, add 1 T. sugar and 2 T. rice vinegar. I made two double batches of rice, one in the rice cooker and one on the stovetop, and I thought both were equally good.

So, for future reference (because we will definitely be doing this again), let me write out the recipe as I made it:

Sushi Rice

4 cups water

3 cups rice

1 1/2 T. sugar

3 T. rice vinegar

Rinse rice several times in a colander over a bowl. Then drain excess water so you're left with just rice. Place rice in rice cooker or in saucepan. Add 4 c. water to the rice. Stir in sugar and vinegar. Bring to a boil; cook, covered for 20 minutes (on stove) or as directed for rice cooker.

Malachi looks so sad, but I think he is just concentrating intently

Rolling the sushi was the best part. It was so fun to choose what combinations of things to put into your roll. I loved the salmon and the tuna, and I loved the bright flavor of the thin thin slices of lemon. Next time I want to perfect our sauces even more, but even the simple soy-sauce based sauces we made were quite good.

Todd was the best with the children. They ALL needed help at once, and he was always there to give it. Whereas I kept saying, "Just a minute, I'm making my OWN right now!"

We made some rice balls too, but I think everyone liked the sushi best. Seb arranged his plate with meticulous care, as we had learned how attentive the Japanese are to their food presentation.

Making our own sushi was also great because it allowed us to share the rolls really easily, and try a whole bunch of different combinations. There wasn't anything I didn't like. Everything was SO tasty!