Homeschool Science: Stages of Mitosis Cookie Models

Say that you're a high school junior whose mother assigned her a microscope lab to observe, identify, and sketch the stages of mitosis in a root tip. 

Say that you're worried that the stages of mitosis might still be a tad fuzzy in your mind, but you're pretty over all that sit-down-and-study business, because it's been a long week, and also you crave sugar.

You can study the stages of mitosis just as well by making cookies modeling the stages of mitosis!

We did this exact same activity a couple of years ago, during one of our (many) times studying cells, but those cookies were a lot simpler--though still delicious. One of my favorite things about spiraling back around to the same topic, and even to the same activity to study the same topic, is that every time you come back you can add to the kid's base level of knowledge, which then goes up every time you come back. You can contextualize, go into greater depth, perform more sophisticated analysis--all the good stuff! Two years ago, the kids' stages of mitosis cookie models were pretty simple, showing essentially just the cell membrane and the chromosomes. This time, Will also added the major cell organelles, because more candy is always better!

Will used my favorite cut-out sugar cookie recipe, and I made her a nice, big batch of cream cheese frosting to go on top. She carved the cookie shapes that she needed--

--baked them, and then it was time for the fun part!

Did you know that the after-Halloween sales are the best place to buy most of your decorating candy for Christmas cookies? You can divert some of them to stages of mitosis cookies, as well.

Did you know that if you microwave a Starburst for 3-5 seconds you can sculpt with it? It makes a great nucleus!

The food crafting got a little too sticky and chaotic for my tastes VERY quickly, so I don't remember what organelles most of these candy embellishments are supposed to represent, but Will knew what they were at the time, so that works for me. 

Thanks to her slightly unconventional study method, her microscope lab went swimmingly and now takes pride of place in her Biology lab notebook.

And the stages of mitosis were delicious!

P.S. Here's the book that Will's using to add a lab component to her biology study:

P.P.S. Want to see what other messy, chaotic, educational activities we get up to every day? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Halloween 2020: The Global Pandemic/Pre-Presidential Election Edition

 The kids didn't even make costumes this year, and it's nevertheless our scariest Halloween yet!

This afternoon, as I drove by the Planned Parenthood with my arm out the window flipping off the abortion protestors, some guy yelled at me, "Trump is still #1! You have a nice day, Ma'am!" 

I don't totally know what to do with that. Like, my side of the conversation was very much a non-verbal, "I don't like how you want to strip away my body autonomy," and his was all, "I love stripping away your body autonomy! Also I love racist, homophobic, nepotistic sex criminal tax evaders! But at least I'm not going to call you a bitch!"

I guess he's not spending his evenings low-key planning the overland route he'll take with his daughters to Canada while evading the hunter squads that want to traffic them into government-mandated reproductive slavery because an "originalist" version of the Constitution basically has women listed as property...

Or how about another sign I saw, held by a woman protesting... a reasonable response to a global pandemic, I guess?... that proclaimed that she chose not to live in fear.

MUST BE NICE.

I, myself, am pretty busy living in all the fear over here, but in my free time I've been working my butt off trying to give my teenagers some magical memories of their second-favorite holiday even though they can't do any of their favorite things:

Such as trick-or-treating.

Trick-or-treating with friends.

Trick-or-treating from the local fraternities and sororities.

Trick-or-treating at the nearby state park.

Trick-or-treating in our favorite neighborhood with all the epic decorations.

There's already so little time left for them to enjoy the kid-version of Halloween, and now they've lost one more year.

I'm trying to make it up to them with at-home versions of sugar. Every Halloween treat they've ever wanted to try making? We have made it this month.

Check out our caramel apples that almost worked!

I'm a little bummed because I am all the time bragging how Serious Eats never does me wrong and their recipes always work for me and they're impossible for me to mess up, and yet this Serious Eats caramel apple recipe did NOT teach me how to successfully make caramel apples:

We used the candy thermometer and everything, and yet all the toppings and most of the caramel ended up slumping off of our apples. Fortunately, we're not a very fastidious people so we just spooned it all back on and ate them anyway:

They were delicious!

Will's Halloween foodie dream wasn't particularly spooky, but it was something that I know she's long wanted to do with the apples that we get from our local orchard:

Made-from-scratch apple pie, homemade pie crust and all!

I don't particularly like pie--I mean, I guess I technically like anything that has that much sugar in it, but I could tell you off the top of my head probably forty sweet treats I'd rather have--but even I thought that this pie was astoundingly tasty. And clearly the rest of the family agreed!

I kind of want to try hand pies next, but after making our traditional apple cake and several pints of applesauce, we're almost out of apples!

Here's another new recipe that we tried this year:

The kids are exceedingly fond of cinnamon rolls, and cinnamon rolls in the shape of bloody guts did not gross them out at all:

If anything, I think that baking them like this made them even more soft and tender, and the cranberry chutney that I mixed into the cream cheese frosting added not just those disgusting blobs the exact color of clotted blood, but also a lovely tang!

Here's one food tradition that I gave up on this year:

Yep, everybody's carving pumpkins and I'm not forcing any of them to save me the seeds in a separate bowl for roasting. I'm the only one who ever eats them until I start sneaking them into everyone else's food a few weeks later, but I just cleaned out the pantry and found a ton of nuts, so I've got enough going on sneaking nuts into everyone's food for the foreseeable future without adding a bunch of pumpkin seeds to the mix.

Will's pumpkin turned out adorable, but Syd's is inexplicably terrifying this year. It watches me through the family room window, and every day its smile collapses a little more into a grimace of pained loathing.

This is also only food-adjacent, but Will and I are smack in the middle of making ourselves a whole apothecary of spooky potion bottles:

I've only got a few finished out of the ton that we have planned, but they're seriously awesome and the best way to use up old bottles!

Okay, back to the food!

Every year, Matt's mummy meatloaf is more terrifying than the year before. This year, the kids specifically protested the pecan rotten teeth--see why I have to sneak nuts into their diet?--but I thought it was brilliant. That's a dozen fewer pecan halves that I'm going to have to grind up, stir into muffins, and then insist that I didn't!

We've got scary movies planned for every night this week (along with binging Supernatural, because my other hobby is attempting to get the kids hooked on my favorite weird TV shows so I have someone to watch them with), and on Saturday after dark, I'm going to lock the kids in their room and then hide candy all over the house. I'll turn off all the lights, give them each a flashlight, and release them to hunt for their Halloween candy.

At least the evening sugar high will be the same as every year!

Homeschool History: Make a Gingerbread Stonehenge on Top of a Cookie Cake

This is what happens when you write lesson plans while you're hungry.

Chapter 2 of the high school kid's astronomy textbook covers the history of astronomy, and we've done some really cool projects to extend that information or contextualize it--with even a couple more planned, because I freaking LOVE the history of astronomy.

The most elaborate of these projects--so far--has been making a gingerbread Stonehenge, something that I have wanted to do approximately all my life. 

Modeling is a great way to help a kid really dig into the geography and physicality of an artifact, as well as encourage them to look more closely at it. I mean, yes, you probably know what Stonehenge looks like more or less, but how many stones are there actually? What is their exact configuration? How many are currently standing? What, exactly, do we think it looked like when first constructed?

Making a model, whether it's out of clay or gingerbread, means that you've got to put the research in to answer most of those questions, and the answers will likely stick in your memory, too.

The gingerbread is just the bonus!

For this project, I first made this M&M cookie cake. I've baked this cookie cake a few times, and although it's not my favorite cookie recipe, it IS a reliable and tasty-enough cookie cake, which is why I keep it in my repertoire. But if anybody knows a reliable cookie cake recipe that also tastes so super amazing, please let me know! We eat a lot of cookie cakes over here!

For the gingerbread, I used the construction gingerbread recipe from Serious Eats. This is what we used for our thousand and one gingerbread cookies--and houses!--last Christmas, and anyway, Serious Eats would never steer me wrong. I made royal icing using this Wilton recipe, which is convenient since that's the brand of meringue powder I own! Even halving the recipe I made WAY too much, but the recipe claims that you can freeze it, so, remembering last Christmas Eve when I forced everyone together to decorate cookies at 6:00 pm and THEN realized that we were out of powdered sugar, I was pretty stoked to freeze the rest. Cross your fingers that it's still delicious at 6:00 pm on Christmas Eve!

Add some green cream cheese frosting to the top of the cookie cake (I thought about floating the idea to the high school kid that we pipe it on using the pastry tip that looks like grass, but even I know when I'm going too far. Sometimes), and it was ready for Stonehenge!

The high school kid decided independently how to size and cut her Stonehenge pieces, and she did a terrific job, considering that when she had all of Stonehenge laid out on the cookie sheet, there was just enough leftover for a couple of gingerbread people (which I also froze, because you CANNOT have too many Christmas cookies to decorate!). 

If we had this project to do over again, I'd encourage her to use royal icing to place the gingerbread on the cookie cake before frosting it--maybe that piping bag would have been the best idea, after all! The toughest part was definitely making the stones stand up on the cookie cake, but fortunately that royal icing made easy work of placing all the cross-pieces:

I LOVE how Stonehenge turned out. It's delicious, historically not entirely inaccurate, and delightfully festive for the time more or less around the autumn equinox.

I'm not going to guarantee that we're not going to make another one for the Winter Solstice.

If you're interested in a more sustained study of Stonehenge, check out my other favorite resources!

• Stonehenge Skyscape. I really like this site because it gives an accurate simulation of the position of the sun, moon, and stars and planets visible from Stonehenge, based on the current local time.
• sand clay Stonehenge. This homemade sand clay, with some black food coloring added to the recipe, makes the model Stonehenge look really realistic!
• coloring page. These Education.com coloring pages are often surprisingly good. If you print them extra small, they're perfect for adding to a homemade giant map.
• British Prehistory. This BBC page is a good way to get some more geographic and historical context for Stonehenge and other henges from the same time period.
• Stonehenge visitor information. The official website for Stonehenge is SO GOOD! It tells you a ton of background information about the site, has excellent photos of artifacts in the attached museum, and links to a bunch of other prehistoric sites in the UK. 
• Stonehenge audio tour. Do you like to close your eyes and use your imagination? This audio tour, meant to be listened to actually at Stonehenge, will make you feel like you're there!
• Stonehenge: The Story of a Sacred Landscape
• If Stones Could Speak: Unlocking the Secrets of Stonehenge
• A Brief History of Timekeeping

Next up: the high school kid and I follow in Galileo's footsteps and observe the nightly positions of Jupiter's moons!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How We Earned the Girl Scout Senior Locavore Badge

One thing about all this time staying on my own property due to the pandemic is that I have been absolutely banging out some nagging projects. Like, long-term to-do list-type projects are getting done over here every day.

Cool, I guess? I'd still rather be able to go to the park every day and drive my kid to ballet class and check out more library books, but whatever.

Anyway, along with trimming back all the shrubs and brush on our property, washing all our LEGOs (I didn't say that these projects were all rational...), auditing my Girl Scout troop's bank account (once every six months is NOT an ideal schedule for this, yikes), deep cleaning the shower (same), and admitting to myself that there are publicist-sent books that I am simply never going to review and I should put them in our Little Free Library, I started organizing some of my digital photos and discovered that apparently I had so many adventures last year that I didn't even write about some of them!

Sigh... I mean, I'm having so few adventures right now that I'm seriously going to describe to you HOW I washed our LEGOs later, but cool, 2019 Julie Who Had So Many Adventures She Didn't Even Write about Them. Cool.

Anyway, this is the story of how my Girl Scout troop earned the Senior Locavore badge last year, when we could all meet together in person and do things in public. These particular plans do NOT lend themselves to being of a ton of use while sheltering in place, but if you've got internet access and a farmer's market that does curbside pickup, your own Scouts could earn this one individually at home.

The inspiration for my own Girl Scout troop earning this particular badge was a grant that our local farmer's market had won, allowing them to give youth groups who arranged a field trip to their market a $50 voucher to buy farmer's market products during their visit. How could you possibly pass up a generous deal like that?!? Even if there were NO relevant Girl Scout badges to earn at a farmer's market I still wouldn't pass up that deal, and I was even more stoked because, of course, Girl Scouts has LOADS of relevant badges to earn at a farmer's market.

PREP WORK

Arranging the field trip with the farmer's market was the most important piece of prep work, obviously.

I also hit up AAA for as many maps of Indiana that they'd give me, which was four. I keep hold of these maps, and we've used them in different meetings to plan hiking and camping trips. I dug out a couple of compasses from the closet (my favorite is this compass, although I do not want to talk about how hard it was to reassemble after Will "accidentally" took it apart), and got troop parents to bring a couple more. 

At the time, I was already working on this large-format clipboard project for my own kids, so I cut the extra MDF to size to make a couple more large-format clipboard bases. I wanted the kids to have plenty of work space for those maps!

Since I wanted the kids to complete the entire badge in one meeting, and we'd be picking out food, anyway, I decided that after visiting the farmer's market, we'd walk a few blocks to the lawn in front of our city hall. The building is unlocked during farmer's market hours, so the kids could wash their hands (and the produce!), and there's a nice tiered grass and stone area where we could spread out. There, I planned to give each group a "cooking challenge" for the food they'd picked out at the farmer's market, so I packed knives, cutting boards, serving bowls and utensils, and asked other troop parents to bring food prep supplies, as well. I also announced that Step 4 of the badge would be on the kids' own to complete, but if a kid wanted to have completely earned the badge by the end of our meeting, they could bring a dish for Step 4 to the meeting to include in our post-cooking challenge potluck. The kids would have been perfectly happy eating just their cooking challenge creations for their potluck dinner, but I thought that it was nice to also have some baked goods and casseroles to mix in.

Along with that optional dish, I asked each kid to bring to the meeting their water bottle, a personal mess kit, and something to tie their hair back--with Girl Scouts, you have ALWAYS got to be making somebody tie their hair back! The kids in my troop don't all have their own phones, so I also noted that I'd be dividing the kids into groups of 2 or 3, and each group would need access to something that could take photos.

The  main thing that I prepared in advance, however, was a farmer's market scavenger hunt. I wanted a way not just to have the kids meet the badge requirements, but also to explore the farmer's market and engage with the sellers, so I wrote this scavenger hunt for the kids to do in their small groups:



You might think that all of my safety info at the beginning is a little weird... well, our local farmer's market was currently dealing with the fallout from the realization that one of their vendors was a white supremacist. There had been a lot of protests and counter-protests, at a previous farmer's market there'd been a bunch more white supremacists "guarding" their stand, and our field trip was going to be on the first farmer's market date after the whole event had been shut down for two weeks.

Also, the white supremacist was a former friend, not just of mine but of some of the other troop moms, too, and most of our kids had been friendly with her kids.

Good times, amiright? Fortunately, I have another friend who knows several farmer's market vendors, and while I was a couple of blocks away with my troop doing our intro and getting ready to walk over to the market, she was texting me that everything was looking peaceful, with no white supremacists selling their Nazi tomatoes anywhere to be seen.

BADGE ACTIVITY #1: What is a locavore?

To begin our meeting, the kids and I discussed the definition of "locavore." The kids brainstormed some reasons why it's good to eat locally, and decided that local food is good for your body because it's fresh, it's good for the economy because you're spending money on the people who live and work in your community, and it's good for the environment because you're not using resources to ship food to you from far away.

The kids got bogged down, though (as I'd hoped they would), when we tried to decide EXACTLY what "local" means. Is it ten miles? One hundred?

The reality is that there isn't really an exact standard; people generally have to decide for themselves their own range for eating locally. I told the kids that part of their task at the farmer's market would be to find out how far some of the producers had traveled to vend here, and to do that, they needed to annotate their maps.

The idea behind annotating the map is that the kids put our current location as the center, and then they used the compass to draw concentric circles that represented distance away from the center. We found the map scale and saw that it was 1 inch to 13 miles, so the kids decided to draw a new circle for every inch.

This was a challenging activity for some kids who'd never used a compass before, and for other kids who'd never practiced much map-reading, but I'd divided them into small teams of two to three kids first, and fortunately there was somebody in every group who knew how to do both. 

Most groups drew 4-5 concentric circles before they decided they'd done enough. Together, we tried to find a familiar place or two on the map for every circle, so the kids could better visualize the scale.

BADGE ACTIVITY #2: Tour the farmer's market, complete a scavenger hunt, and go shopping!

Normally, I'd only give the kids one activity to do at one time, but there was a lot that we needed to accomplish at the farmer's market. Fortunately, all the kids in the troop are good listeners!

Task #1: Complete a scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt was designed to meet Steps 1 and 2 of the Locavore badge requirements. It involved interviewing someone involved in the food delivery chain (Step 1), learning when certain foods are in season (Step 2), and finding food sources on their food-radius map (Step 2). 

I added in some more fun activities to get the kids engaged with the food and the vendors, and I included directions for how I expected them to behave. Kids don't always have experience interacting with business owners and retail workers, so part of the learning experience was figuring out how to engage someone politely. It's easy to get so task-oriented that you don't realize you're interrupting, and it's sometimes hard to follow the social script of a new situation.

Matt made it pretty for me. It's good to have a graphic designer as a spouse!

 I told the kids that they didn't necessarily have to complete the entire scavenger hunt, but they all had a blast and so I ended up keeping us at the farmer's market long enough (a little too long, honestly, considering all the other activities we had planned) for them all to finish.

Task #2: Shop for a food preparation challenge. We had three teams of kids, so I gave each team of kids one of the following assignments:

• Garden Salad
• Fruit Salad
• Crostini, or, Something Interesting to Put on Bread

Each team had a budget of $15, and I kept the last $5 to help out if a team went over. (Spoiler Alert: Team Fruit Salad needed that extra five bucks. Fruit is expensive!). 

As the kids worked on their scavenger hunts, they were also meant to be figuring out what they wanted to buy for their challenge. I do think it was nice that they had both the scavenger hunt and the food prep challenge, because this encouraged them to interact with and learn a lot more about the vendors than either activity alone would have done, and it was highly amusing to watch them busily going back and forth between vendors, talking through the pros and cons of various food items and agonizing over hard decisions. Whenever they reported back to pass off their haul, it was clear that some vendors were also being incredibly generous--those kids got a LOT of delicious food for their money!

After everyone had finished the scavenger hunt and spent all their money, we walked a few blocks over to that nice grassy area I'd scoped out, washed hands and produce, and then the kids got to work on Step 3 of the badge!

BADGE ACTIVITY #3: FOOD PREPARATION CHALLENGE

Here's part of Team Fruit Salad in action:

Here's one-third of Team Garden Salad:

And here's an example of the very creative stylings of Team Crostini!

If I had this to do over again, I'd encourage the teams to barter some of their ingredients. Wouldn't some blackberries and apple slices be lovely on bread? And I wouldn't mind some sweet peppers or cucumbers in my fruit salad!

BADGE ACTIVITY #4: Local Foods Potluck

The kids could have gone on happily chopping produce and putting it in bowls and on bread forever, but eventually I called time so that they could show off their creations. Then we washed hands again, laid out our feast, had the kids who'd brought dishes from home to meet Step 4 explain them, and the kids enjoyed a Local Foods Potluck as Step 5 of their badge. 

I'd brought some plastic baggies, so while the kids ate I packaged up their unused ingredients into a variety of bags, and when they'd finished eating, I also portioned out their uneaten food challenge creations while they ran around and played. I called them all back to clean up, and when the space looked as if nobody had ever completed a cooking challenge or held a potluck there ever before, I had the kids all line up, and then got to take turns choosing something from the leftovers, until everything was gone. 

This turned out to be a stellar Girl Scout troop meeting! I think the kids all really enjoyed themselves, and they got a change to practice some academic skills, some practical skills, and some real-world social skills while having fun. They got some exercise, they spent time outdoors, and they ate healthy food. They would have liked a lot more free time to socialize, so this would have been even better as a half-day meeting after the Saturday farmer's market, but for a Tuesday evening on a beautiful day in a summer with no pandemic, I'd say it was pretty perfect!

Six Months Ago: Homemade Halloween Treats: Sandwich Cookie Critters

One Year Ago: Homeschool Science: The Chicken Egg Osmosis Experiment

Two Years Ago: Homeschool Biology: Extract and Visualize DNA from Beef Liver

Three Years Ago: An Afternoon at Ocmulgee National Monument

Four Years Ago: Pom-Pom Pals

Five Years Ago: A Passion for Perler Beads

Six Years Ago: The Best Way to Hike

Seven Years Ago: Kid Meal: The Incredible, Edible Soft-Boiled Egg

Eight Years Ago: Homeschool Boot Camp

Nine Years Ago: On Daytona Beach

Ten Years Ago: A Temporary Flower Installation

Eleven Years Ago: I Can't Be Your Partner in Crime

Twelve Years Ago: Finally, Clean Lockers

Making Bubble Tea with My Teenager

You guys, I cannot afford bubble tea.

Rather, I can afford it on Syd's birthday, and after her ballet recital. Maybe on Mother's Day, but definitely not as often as Syd would like to drink bubble tea, which is daily.

Seriously, Friends, bubble tea is something like $4.50 here! It's not a steak dinner, sure, but I have a hard time paying that for a beverage. I don't buy steak dinners, either.

You know what's cheap, though? I'll tell you what's cheap:

Tapioca pearls. Matcha powder. Almond milk.

None of those ingredients are even close to $4.50 a serving, and what's better is that I don't have to get out of my pajamas to turn them into bubble tea!

All the credit goes to Syd for this experimental process. Back in the spring she requested tapioca pearls, and I helped her play around with them some, mostly putting them into cold-brew coffee spiked with chocolate milk, which I let her drink, because whatever.

But Syd wanted more the restaurant-quality, $4.50 per serving type of bubble tea, and what we were making wasn't nearly cutting it, so off and on over the past few months, she's kept experimenting. And finally, just this week, she's nailed it, and now we can make ourselves absolutely delicious matcha bubble tea whenever we want.

I get to be in charge of the tapioca pearls. They're super easy to make, which is good because they don't keep AT ALL, so you have to make them fresh whenever you want them. You just follow the instructions on the bag, but instead of scooping them into simple syrup when they're done, I stir a whopping spoonful of honey into them and that makes them perfect and delicious.

Since we have a Vitamix (I remember having an anxiety attack about the cost of that blender once upon a time, but I've had it by now for well over a decade, and the only thing that's ever gone wrong with it is the pitcher cracking back in April, and I'm almost positive that happened when I accidentally blended the plastic cap a little bit, oops), Syd uses this recipe from the Vitamix website, but I know for a fact that she doesn't bother with blooming the matcha. She says she can't taste the difference, and I sure as heck don't care!

When the separate ingredients are ready, Syd divides the tapioca pearls between our cups--

--and then adds the matcha milk:



I feel like vertical videos are supposed to be gauche, but I don't care. You're lucky I didn't do it vertical AND in slo-mo or as a time-lapse!

You guys, this matcha milk tea is DELICIOUS. We've had these exact metal straws since May (and I LOVE them), and they're the perfect diameter for slurping up boba!

See, even Gracie likes it!

Right now, Matt's in the other room giving the kids a lesson on how to use Powerpoint (I'm eavesdropping, which is how I know that he's assigned them to create a presentation about tacos to prove their mastery), and I am just about to fall asleep in my chair, but I'm toughing it out, because as soon as he's done Syd and I have HUGE plans.

We're going to jammy up, make a double batch of matcha bubble tea, and then settle into my bed to watch the 1976 version of Carrie, which Syd has been longing to see since October. It's a cheap date, and one that I am very, very, very excited about.

Teach Your Kids to Make Applesauce (And Then You Never Have to Do it Again Yourself!)

Homemade applesauce is one of the official Things That We Do with Apples in the Fall.

It's tradition! I mean, you know, as far as tradition states that we buy waaaaaay too many apples at the apple orchard in the fall, and then have to find useful things to do with the ones that even we couldn't stuff ourselves with (in this family, we are VERY into apples).

I know that store-bought no-sugar-added applesauce is inexpensive, but our applesauce also has no sugar added, and it's fresh, and local, and we know where all the apples came from, and it's incredibly delicious, and it's good for the kids to learn how to make their own food.

Especially when it's this easy to make!

1. Peel and core the apples. You can prepare as few or as many apples as you want! I think it's a good way to use up any apples that are unsightly enough that the kids won't eat them as-is, mwa-ha-ha.

This bushel of apples did not keep as well as I'd hoped it would (I think it's because I let them all sit at room temperature, when I should have kept most of them stored somewhere cooler), so I had the kids pick through the entire bushel, taking out every apple that had a bad spot or was looking pretty bruised.

The kids peeled and cored each apple, and cut away any remaining bad spots. Then they tossed them directly into that big pot there in the middle of the table:

2. Cook the apples on low in a lidded pot until sufficiently done. The kids put the lid on the pot, then put it on the stove on low heat. This cooks down very gradually for most of the afternoon, and the kids just have to remember to check on it every hour or so:

 
Each time they check on it, they stir it with a wooden spoon and start to mash it down when it's soft enough, and when it reaches a consistency that they both like (chunky is yummy!), they take it off the heat and spoon it directly into large Mason jars.

The kitten helps, because of course he does!

Notice that I had them leave plenty of head space at the top of each Mason jar--we leave one jar in the refrigerator to eat right away, and store the rest of the jars in the freezer.

Well, except for two giant bowls full of applesauce that the kids eat piping hot, of course!

The kids made another, smaller batch of this applesauce a few weeks later, with the very last apples remaining from that bushel, at least the ones that Will didn't juice, and that was it for our orchard apples!

We like this applesauce recipe enough that I've never experimented, but sometime I plan to get enough time on my hands that I go a little stir-crazy and decide to try out something like these spiced or fruit-blended applesauce recipes. I'm also interested in the fact that the author doesn't peel the apples first; instead, the applesauce is blended afterwards, which apparently breaks up the peels enough to hide them? I'd love the nutrition and fiber boost of including the apple peels, but the one time I did try to make applesauce with the peels on, I was definitely left with woody bits of peel all through the applesauce, so I dunno.

P.S. For those of you playing the homeschool game, here are the boxes that we checked off with this activity!

• Both kids used this as a step for the Girl Scout Senior Locavore badge (Syd is only a Cadette, but I let her earn Senior badges. Feel free to call the Badge Police on me!).
• Will used this as an enrichment activity for the Girl Scout Senior Sow What Journey.
• I'm also looping the Sow What Journey into Will's AP Environmental Science class, since food issues are intrinsically tied into land use.

20+ Things to Do with Apples

Did you, as well, just get home from the orchard with two bushels of apples?

Did you look at them, taking over all of your counter space, and wonder if maybe you bought too many?

You did not buy too many. Instead, you just blessed yourself with a month-long adventure in making ALL THE APPLE THINGS!

Here are all of OUR favorite apple things:

1. apple cake. I apparently made this a decade ago and then promptly forgot about it (good thing that I blogged about it, though!), and then made it for only the second time this year. It's DELICIOUS and I'm never going to forget about it ever again.
2. apple cider doughnuts. Syd is still super into doughnuts. I've never been able to bring myself to deep-fry anything, but we'll try any baked doughnut recipe that we encounter. If deep-frying didn't horrify me, though, I'd also be making these apple fritters, because those are MY favorites!
3. apple peel jelly. Our apple peels are the rightful property of our chickens, but maybe your apple peels want to be jelly!
4. apple pie. I don't actually like pie crust, so apple pie with a crumble topping is my favorite!
5. apple print bunting. I really like the simple materials used in this project. Another good option is fabric paint on canvas buntings.
6. applesauce. This is how we make our applesauce, except we don't even put in water--we just peel and core apples, put them in a pot, put the lid on, turn it on low, and show up every now and then to stir. Fruit blends are fun to make from whatever other fruit you've got kicking around the freezer.
7. baked apples with oatmeal. Will, especially, loves these baked apples. I can get leftover oatmeal eaten by baking an apple, warming the leftover oatmeal, and then spooning into the hot apple's core. Don't tell Will she's eating leftovers!
8. bird feeders. We like hanging these bird feeders in front of the playroom window in the autumn and winter. 
9. candy apples. Candy apples are my FAVORITE (or at least they used to be, since I probably haven't had one since I was Syd's age!). This is one of those recipes that I've always wanted to try, but I'm afraid of candy making. As soon as I get brave enough to figure it out, though, the next thing that I'm making is galaxy candy apples!
10. caramel apples. Syd has long been obsessed with caramel apples, and I swear that we've made them a zillion different ways. Decorating them with melted chocolate and candy is the best part!
11. caramel apple monsters. Here's a fun pre-Halloween way to eat caramel apples in a more manageable serving size. Candy eyes are always a bonus!
12. cast iron apple crisp. EVERYTHING tastes better when made in a cast iron pan.
13. cinnamon applesauce quick bread. It's really good!
14. cinnamon dough. Who wouldn't love a delicious-smelling oven-dry clay? This dough uses a ton of cinnamon and applesauce, and makes a sturdy, sweet-smelling clay that we like to use for Christmas ornaments.
15. cinnamon sugar apple blondies. I generally prefer my sweet things to be chocolatey. Unfortunately, Syd doesn't like chocolate--the horror! So apple season is my time to indulge her with all the apple treats that we both like.
16. clove apple pomander. This is a sweet nature craft that goes well with a read-aloud of Little House in the Big Woods. 
17. DIY apple cider vinegar. Think about all the crazy projects we could get into if we only had our own apple orchard!
18. fruit leather. I actually make this with only fruit and spices--you don't need sweetener when you're eating applesauce! You can use homemade applesauce, blended with whatever other fruit purees and spices you prefer.
19. Mummify an apple. Experiment with the Ancient Egyptian method of mummification to figure out how best to preserve your apple for the afterlife.
20. shrunken apple heads. Here's a good beginner carving project for young ones. Dry them or, if you're having a Halloween party, pop them straight in with your punch.

Do YOU have a favorite thing to do with apples? Tell me about it and I'll probably do it--I've still got half a bushel on the kitchen table!

How to Make a Clove Apple Pomander

This is a repost of my original article, which I wrote for Crafting a Green World in 2010. Time flies, and yet Syd still wears leotards more often than not, we still have that same cup and water bottle from the second picture, and we still have a zillion and a half apples hanging out on the kitchen table.

And we might still make clove apples out of some of them!

(Psst! The Amazon links are affiliate ones! If you buy something from Amazon after clicking through an affiliate link it doesn't affect you, but Amazon might pay me half a penny in two months!)

Get your Little House on and make an apple pomander - aka a clove apple - this fall. It smells amazing, and Ma Ingalls will be so proud!

In Little House in the Big Woods, Ma receives an apple pomander from her sister-in-law for Christmas. Laura writes, "Aunt Eliza had brought Ma a large red apple stuck full of cloves. How good it smelled! And it would not spoil, for so many cloves would keep it sound and sweet."

An apple pomander - aka a clove apple - is a wonderful present, because it works exactly the way that Laura Ingalls Wilder describes it: it smells wonderful, it won't rot, and the stem provides the perfect place to tie a serviceable piece of twine or a fancy ribbon to hang your clove apple in a closet or hallway.

To make a clove apple of your own, you will need:

• An apple, free of bruises or cuts, with the stem attached.
• Plenty of whole cloves. I buy my cloves in bulk from a restaurant supply store, but your local co-op natural grocery also stocks them in smaller quantities.
• Bamboo skewer
• Twine or ribbon
• Strong glue

For the clove apple to keep, the cloves must be stuck all over the apple, quite close together. They don't need to be touching each other, but you can't make pretty designs or otherwise leave blank spots on your apple and expect it to last. However, you can make pretty designs with the cloves if you only want the apple for the season- through your spectacular Thanksgiving dinner, perhaps, to then be composted with the other leftovers.

While it's possible to stick the cloves straight into the apple, this can be tiresome and it'll cramp your fingers after a while. Additionally, small children lack the strength in their little finger muscles to pull off this part of what is otherwise an accessible activity for them. Instead, use a bamboo skewer to poke several holes at a time in your apple, then stick the cloves stem-first into those holes. It's easier on your fingers and I think that it makes the work go faster.

If you are creating a design on your apple with cloves, you can first draw the design right onto the apple using a fine-point Sharpie in a light color; as you place the cloves, place them end-to-end to completely obscure the pen marks.

 As soon as you're finished, go ahead and tie your twine or ribbon to the apple's stem. I reinforced my knot with glue, because I don't really need the trouble of a clove apple suddenly bonking itself down onto my head someday.

In opposition to popular usage, we didn't hang our clove apples in our closets; I didn't really want ALL of our clothes to smell like we'd been smoking clove cigarettes. Instead, I hung them in cool, dry nooks all around the house, so that as you walk down the hallway, say, or snuggle on the couch to read bedtime stories, you can suddenly get a whiff of that sweet, comforting, handmade clove perfume.

Homemade Halloween Treats: Sandwich Cookie Critters

Like the marshmallow monster cupcakes, these sandwich cookie critters were both inspired by a Pinterest project (Chips Ahoy! critters!) and made entirely from ingredients I already had on hand.

Well, I cheated a little bit. Matt went shopping for the ingredients to make oatmeal cookies, made them, and then I stole eight of them to make a critter for everyone in the family. But the cream cheese and powdered sugar were leftover from Matt's birthday (birthday carrot cake for the win!), I bought the food coloring to make rainbow cake for my Girl Scout troop's Bridging party, and I'm bound and determined that those candy eyes won't live through yet another Halloween.

Here's the cream cheese frosting recipe that I used.

If only I'd worked in a way to use up some more of our sprinkles, I'd have won on all fronts!

Want to keep up with all our random Halloween crafts and activities and weirdness? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page, where I post lots of pics of what we're up to and links to what we're into.

Homemade Halloween Treats: Marshmallow Monster Cupcakes

You've probably noticed by now that my favorite thing to do in October is make Halloween treats! Some of them, like the mummy dogs, mummy meatloaf, and vampire margaritas, we make every year, and some of them, like the trick-or-treat cookies, we make once, wipe the sweat off our brows, and tell ourselves to enjoy the heck out of them because we are NEVER MAKING THESE AGAIN OMG.

Seriously, I still wince when I think about making those trick-or-treat cookies.

This October, I've so far been trying to make treats using just the supplies that we already have. So what can you make from cake mix and white candy melts leftover from your Girl Scout troop's Bridging party, marshmallows leftover from the latest campfire night, candy eyes probably leftover from Halloween 2018, and sprinkles that I surely need to use up this year because they've been on our shelves for... a while?

Marshmallow Monster Cupcakes, that's what!

These marshmallow monster cupcakes are loosely based on the Spooky Boo Brownies from the Betty Crocker website, except that the Spooky Boo Brownies look Pinterest perfect and these marshmallow monsters are horrifying and hilarious.

The marshmallow monster cupcakes are made from plain cupcakes turned upside-down and set on a cooling rack over a baking pan. Syd and I put a marshmallow on top of each, then poured melted candy melts over the tops of them. It was SUPPOSED to make the marshmallows look like ghosts, but I think it made them look more like grotesque squid beasts, so we decided to make them look even more monstrous by means of the liberal application of candy eyes and sprinkles:

Fun fact: these little monsters were also DELICIOUS! You could definitely elevate the quality of flavor by using, you know, NOT the cheapest store-brand ingredients like I did, but we loved biting through the crunchy layer of Kroger-brand candy melts into the soft Kroger-brand marshmallow and sweet Kroger-brand cupcake, and these monsters did not last long.

And then Syd and I used up the rest of the candy melts by skewering marshmallows, dipping them in candy melts, and rolling them through the sprinkles. And then I think I jumped on the trampoline for 20 minutes while Syd ran laps around the house with the dog, we were so buzzed on sugar.