Easy Icelandic Laufabraud Experience Using Pie Crust

As soon as the kids finished reading Foods of Iceland, they each immediately asked to make laufabraud (funny, they had no desire to make hardfiskur or hakarl...). Laufabraud (pronounce it "LOIF-uh-broith") is a traditional Christmas food in Iceland, made from bread rolled thin, with snowflake and other pretty designs cut into it, then deep-fried.

Fine, it DOES sound super yummy, but I ain't deep frying nothing for nobody!

Since we read that at Christmas time, bakeries often sell laufabraud bread dough all rolled out and ready to be baked, I decided that pie crust cookies would be a reasonable approximation for us. After all, all the kids really wanted were the experiences of cutting pretty designs and eating yummy baked goods, so no need to struggle for undesired authenticity.

Laufabraud is usually fairly large, but the kids wanted to hand samples out at their International Fair (there's lots of geographically-themed noshing going on at the International Fair, let me tell you), so I cut out small circles from the pie crust using my Pappaw's old biscuit cutter, then gave the kids a clean x-acto knife, clean awl, and plastic straw to make their decorations.

If we hadn't been baking these to pass out, the kids definitely would have preferred to make the larger size--cutting tiny designs into 30 small laufabraud cookies sure gets old!

When the kids were finished with the decorating, I sprinkled the cookies with cinnamon sugar and then baked them as you do any pie crust cookie (burning them a bit around the edges is my own personal specialty):

Even though they weren't deep-fried in sheep fat, they were happily nommed up by all the kids!

I was never in Iceland for Christmas, so I haven't tasted authentic laufabraud, either, but I did once bring home from Iceland a bottle of brennivin wrapped up in sweaters in my duffel bag. I technically brought it home as a souvenir for Matt, but after hearing my stories of how it actually tasted and how it made one feel the next day, both he and I were too chicken to break into it, and instead kept it as a knick-knack on a high kitchen shelf until one night it was spotted in the middle of a rowdy grad school party. This being grad school, there were other friends there who'd also been to Iceland (Old Norse is a grad school thing, y'all), and we were somehow persuaded to open it up so we could all dive in.

I think that the next morning, everyone not already in the know finally understood why I'd been so reluctant to open that now-empty bottle...

Organizing Written and Oral Reports in Elementary School: The Iceland Project

My kids write reports and essays fairly often, but our homeschool group's frequent academic fairs are great opportunities for them to really dig in and up their skills--and show them off!

I tried a new organizational strategy this time, borrowed from Third Grade Thinkers, that worked out so perfectly that we're going to keep it for all time. Heck, I may start using this method!

After the kids had each read a couple of general resources on Iceland (Culture Grams and Britannica School gave the best results for this particular subject), they chose some narrower subjects on which to focus: Will wanted to write about Iceland's volcanoes, geysers, and glaciers, while Syd was most interested in Iceland's language, food, and horses.

I cut off a long section of butcher paper for each kid, then wrote their focus subjects, plus a section for the introduction and conclusion, as column heads across it. As the kids read and re-read all the print and online resources they collected, I asked them to find at least one general fact to help them write their introductions, at least one fact with "meaning" that would help them write their conclusions, and at least three facts relating to each focus subject:

I LOVED Third Grade Thinkers' use of sticky notes to write facts on, and for the exact same reasons: they're easily manipulated to reorganize the flow of logic, and their small size encouraged the kids to summarize instead of copying. Intellectual honesty begins young, folks--NO PLAGIARIZING!

The next challenge, of course, is to not let the kid just string the facts together to make each paragraph, but instead to contextualize, be it with example, personal observation, or a sense of meaningfulness. As you'll see in the reports, Syd had an easier time doing this in her oral presentation, simply because of the subjects that she chose to cover; she was able to do an audience participation activity when reporting on Iceland's language, and we made and brought in laufabraud (more on that another time, but yum!) to enrich her reporting of Icelandic food.

For the International Fair, the kids had the final challenge of translating their written reports into engaging oral presentations. We did this in a couple of different ways. When the kids wanted to insert something unscripted--such as the Icelandic greetings that they memorized, or Syd's Icelandic naming activity--into their report for the oral presentation, I had them write what they wanted to do centered and in caps in the appropriate spot of their report, so that they would see it as they were reading and remember to pause their report and complete the unscripted portion. This worked okay, although I had to help Syd get her Icelandic naming activity both started and stopped; I'll have to think more on how to help her work through that independently next time. I also wanted Will to look at her report less and at the audience more, so I narrowed the margins on her written report way down, printed it, and then had her cut the paragraphs apart and glue them to index cards. In rehearsals, she did an excellent job referring to the cards but speaking to the audience, but during her actual presentation, I don't think she looked up from those index cards once! At least she remembered to speak loudly and clearly.

Don't feel as if you have to watch this video of their presentations; for one, I'm ashamed of how shaky my camera work is (I don't think I was actually looking at it as I filmed, because I was so focused on the kids), and there's also an embarrassing part in which both Matt and I rush to chastise Will as she's interrupting/correcting Syd mid-presentation, because we're both super traumatized by the time the kids fought on TV and I, at least, wouldn't have been surprised if Syd had leaped onto Will pro wrestler-style and began to roll around with her in a cloud of dust.


Fortunately, everyone emerged from their presentations unscathed, and the little hellions were able to later pose in triumph:

After the presentations, as everyone's milling around and looking at displays and eating geographically-themed snacks, these two totally random people literally just wandered into our conference room and began to look at all the displays. And it wasn't just walk around, glance at stuff, and wander out again--these people were INVESTED! They stopped at one particular kid's Ancient Egypt display, and admittedly, this kid had done a seriously tremendous job--she's too young to be a fully literate reader, I *think*, but she stood there and recited, from memory, just a giant amount of information about Ancient Egypt--but this couple stood there for something like forever, reading all the captions and actually translating the title of her presentation and her name from the Egyptian hieroglyphics in which she'd written them. Matt was pretty sure that they were going to kidnap the kid to be their language officer at the Stargate, but I sort of imagined them as very clueless and naive tourists from some random country, coming to the United States to see all the sights, and then seeing on the library calendar that, "Oh, Guthrun, look! An International Fair! I remember reading about World Fairs in our history books as a child! We MUST attend!"

And since this kid is definitely still in town and hasn't been indentured to the Stargate, clearly my theory is the correct one.

Here's a partial list of the resources that the kids used to study Iceland:



Of course, there are many more than these, and we didn't even begin to cover Norse myths or the sagas or do any of the activities collected in my Iceland pinboard (and how I dearly wanted to help the kids make a set of runes!). Ah, well...

Gotta save something for next time!

My Latest: Wool, Chickens, Crayons, and our New House

I've been too busy these past two weeks! Kid activities, packing, etsy orders, mortgage paperwork, schoolwork, impromptu house showings--I am definitely feeling the stress. I've managed to keep the kids fed, learning their math, and on time to extracurriculars with the correct gear on (that last one JUST barely...), but in the rare times when I don't *have* to do something, I've found myself just sort of zoning out for a minute to rest my brain. Otherwise, even when I'm working on something else, my brain is doing stuff like trying to figure out where the record player cabinet will go in the new house, or the mint bed, or when we should go mattress shopping.

I was running in so many directions last week, in particular, that I didn't even think to show you the other writing that I've been doing, so this week you get a two-week update in my paid writing! It's kind of silly, too, because along with sales from my pumpkin+bear etsy shop, my outside writing is THE way that I earn the money that I use to buy birthday presents and pay for tennis lessons and field trips, etc., so failing to promote it is not in my best interests. The sites for which I write earn money from advertisements on the site, and the money that we writers earn is based on how many people have been exposed to those ads--i.e. pageviews. So if you like what I do and want to help me pay for postcards at Cahokia and the limestone carving class that Will wants to take, all you have to do is click through to read the following posts

a write-up of the felted wool egg cozies from So Jane

a round-up of felted wool sweater crafts

an essay about urban chickens

a round-up of upcycled projects for the home

and a tutorial for recycled crayons

We close on our new house at the end of the week, so we get to start moving this weekend! I'm hoping we can camp out on the floor of our new house one night, perhaps to go the drive-in, perhaps start getting some of the DIY projects going and schedule the work that we need to have others do for us. I'd like to get the kitchen stocked a bit so that I can feed the kids if we spend an afternoon there, and we have many, many plants languishing in temporary pots that would like to get settled into their new garden beds.

This time, I am going to be VERY thoughtful about where I put the mint, which we do rely on, but geez louise, not as much as it seems to think we do! How on earth do you keep mint from taking over every single other living non-mint piece of greenery, anyway?

Organizing our Home Library by Author and Dewey Decimal Number, or, I Have Finally and Inevitably Lost the Plot

In our current house we have [had] books in just about every room of the house. Large-format non-fiction reference lived in the basement playroom. Adult fiction and some non-fiction lived in the living room, as did certain ready-reference books and popular magazines. Children's books mostly lived in their bedroom. Homeschooling and crafts books lived in the studio. My esoteric fiction and non-fiction (Welsh-English dictionary, anyone?) lived in my bedroom.

This was inconvenient on many levels. I periodically had to sort through the adult fiction shelves to find books that Will would be interested in, as her reading ability and maturity grew. If we were researching a particular topic--frogs, say--we might have to scan books in the living room, in the children's bedroom, the studio, and in the basement playroom, and we still might miss a couple of relevant resources. If I was looking for a book that I wanted to re-read, I didn't know if I would find it in the living room or in the children's room or in my bedroom.

One of my many organizational goals for our new house is to shelve the entire family's books in one central location, probably the big family room with the very high ceilings. I'd like to make a bookshelf similar to this pipe bookshelf shelving unit, also using some marble slabs that Matt bought from our IU Surplus Store back when we were planning to actually put countertops in our kitchen (we never did; they're still plywood). Will agreed to the plan, as long as none of the bookshelves are out of her reach (I may offer a compromise with a stepladder, but we'll see). The plan will only really work, however, if the books are more or less organized; having to scan every book on four dozen shelves is barely less work than having to scan every book in four different rooms.

So while I'm relatively fresh in the face of packing, my first order of business was to organize every book in our house by fiction and non-fiction, to further organize the fiction using alpha by author, to further organize the non-fiction using broad Dewey Decimal categories, and to pack them up in boxes with labels on so that they stay organized.

In case you DON'T think that sounds crazy, check out what doing it actually looks like:

Um... yeah, those are a billion mile-high stacks of books, each with an index card on top labeling it with its author letter or Dewey Decimal category. I spent an entire Saturday doing it, and as if that's not crazy enough, whenever Matt and the kids weren't in the room to witness this further deterioration of my sanity, I arranged each stack with its spines nicely facing out and then photographed it:

This is the S stack. We've got Bram Stoker, William Shakespeare, Lemony Snicket, Edmund Spenser, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Robert Louis Stevenson, Richard Scary, and more. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is in there, as well as Black Beauty and Heidi, and The Sagas of Icelanders, indexed by title since it doesn't have an author.

The P stack is a little light, but we've still got Philip Pullman and Thomas Pynchon. Another way in which this system will be useful is that if I like an author or a series, I like to collect all the available titles, but since I mainly shop used, it's a gradual process. If all the books in the house are catalogued together, it will be easier for me to see, for instance, that I only have the first book in the His Dark Materials series--for shame!

Other than Island of the Blue Dolphins and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the O stack is dominated by Mary Pope Osborne. I'd stopped consciously collecting the Magic Tree House books after Will grew out of them a bit (she still reads the new ones, but doesn't often re-read the old ones), but I'm back at it again now that Syd is a reader.

There's more variety in the M stack. We've got Daisy Meadows, George R.R. Martin, about three copies of The Secret Garden, Stephanie Meyer, Robert McCloskey, Robin McKinley, Herman Melville, Margaret Mitchell, all the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, W. Somerset Maugham, Peyton Place, and L.M. Montgomery.

In the L stack, there's Ira Levin (The Stepford Wives is soooo creepy!), Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, Jack London, Lois Lowry, Gail Carson Levine, and Astrid Lindgren. 

After that, I stopped taking photos because Matt came in, and we've already had many discussions about who is acting crazier because of the move (I say him; he incorrectly says me), so I didn't want to give him any more ammunition.

Matt helped me pack up all the books into boxes--one great thing about volunteering weekly at a food pantry is that I'm able to collect so many boxes!--and label them with Sharpies, and he shoved them into the children's room so that I won't have to look at them.

Five minutes after we'd finished, I found a whole entire shelf of books that I'd forgotten to pack, and then Matt found another stack of books up high on a back shelf out of sight, and then I remembered that I'd packed the book we need for this week's Magic Tree House Club meeting. I threw the leftover books in the giant box in which I was packing blankets, so I'll deal with them later, and while the kids are at tennis class, I'll see if there's a library digital copy of Thanksgiving on Thursday to put on Will's Nook.

If only packing clothes and dishes and linens and craft supplies were as interesting as packing books!

Mamma's Strawberry Cake Recipe

In our family, you get to do a lot of what you want on your birthday.

There was no school (although I think on MY birthday, I'll have the kids do a full day of schoolwork without fussing!).

Matt woke up early and made the kids pancakes for breakfast.

I gave Syd a big toy dragon with moveable wings and a dragon rider whose butt has a magnet in it so he won't fall off even when the dragon flies upside-down. She's played with it a lot, but she also plays with two of the twist ties that came with it; she twisted them into dolls, made outfits for them, and keeps them with her constantly.

For lunch, we walked downtown to an over-priced sandwich shop (Matt and I actually split one meal, it was that bad), then the kids did some gardening at the library.

I got the kids to let me do a "photo shoot" with them:

The kids had their first ever tennis lesson--and they LOVED it!

Matt gave Syd a certificate to keep to help her remember that he bought us all tickets to see Marvel Universe Live in January. How cool does that look?!?

We made homemade pizzas and watched Spider-man (the Toby McGuire one, NOT the reboot--ugh!).

Usually on your birthday, you also get the exact cake that you want, but Syd was having trouble deciding, so I suggested that we make my Mamma's strawberry cake. It's got an elaborate ingredients list and was always made for special occasions when I was a kid, and even though it's been made by other family members since Mamma died, I never had the heart to eat it, although in my mind I can taste it perfectly.

I hate it that Mamma died when I was pregnant with Syd, and the two never got to meet. But even Will was just a toddler, so I also hate that she has no memories of her. I guess I hoped that by starting to make some of Mamma's favorite recipes together, it would make her more real to them.

What I had forgotten, though, was the toxic nature of 1950s cuisine. I actually studied this on a tangent in grad school, so I can tell you that in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, recipes became particularly... odd. Advances in technology caused the introduction of tons more convenience food, from cake mixes and boxed Jello to dairy products and a wide variety of canned goods. Raises in wages meant that more people could afford store-bought convenience foods, and they also became a status symbol, as in "Hey, she could afford a Duncan Hines cake instead of a cake that it took her three hours to make from scratch. She must be FANCY!"

But at the same time, the time and effort that goes into making meals remained a status symbol, as well--you still got a lot of street cred for that whole "slaving away in the kitchen" thing. So to satisfy unconscious desires to both use a lot of packaged foods AND slave away in the kitchen, there started to be a lot of really weird, elaborate recipes that used a ton of packaged, name-brand foods in really weird ways. 7-Up cakes. Jello salad.

So here's Mamma's strawberry cake recipe, from the handwritten cookbook that she made me for Christmas one year:

Strawberry Cake

• 1 box white cake mix
• large box strawberry Jello
• 1 cup Wesson oil
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 cup mashed strawberries, drained
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup coconut
• 1 cup chopped pecans

1. Whisk cake mix and Jello powder together. 
2. Add other ingredients in order listed.
3. Blend well.
4. Bake at 350 degrees in three layers. [Mamma doesn't list a time. I baked my cake in one bundt pan, because I don't have any round cake pans. I started at 43 minutes, which was the maximum cooking time listed for a bundt cake on the box of cake mix, but ended up having to add a total of fifteen extra minutes onto the cooking time.]
5. Cool completely.

Icing

• 1 stick Oleo, softened
• 3/4 cup nuts
• 1 box powdered sugar
• 3/4 cup coconut
• 1/2 cup mashed strawberries

1. Cream sugar and Oleo, adding other ingredients.
2. Cover cake well with plenty between layers. If icing is too thin, add more sugar; if too thick, add a few drops of milk.

I pretty much made this as written, although I couldn't bear to use margarine, and I don't know how much powdered sugar came in a box, so I just made regular butter and powdered sugar icing and added the other ingredients. And I have to say, although it's also horrifying, that Jello does dye and flavor white cake REALLY well. The whole thing was neon pink even before I mixed in the mashed strawberries, and it did taste of "strawberry." So if you don't have sensitivities and you really want a neon-colored, artificially flavored cake, dump a box of Jello into it!

Here's the finished cake (actually decorated by the kids and eaten the next day, because they were too full for cake after our day of fancy meals!):

You can sort of tell that the mashed strawberries by themselves actually did an excellent job of coloring and flavoring the icing. 

I'd like to try a version of this cake that uses more whole foods, with applesauce instead of oil, extra mashed strawberries instead of Jello, and perhaps whipped cream or cream cheese frosting instead of butter, so that it hopefully retains most of the flavor and color of the cake that I remember from my childhood, but doesn't make me worried that we're all going to get cancer and die.

The kids, also, have been inspired by this cake, but not exactly in the same direction: their new goal is to try versions of cake made with different flavors of Jello!

It may be a long, hyper summer...

Growing Like a Tall Tree

Eight years old,

two weeks

 She's eight years old.

one

See the happy birthday girl,

two

She's eight years old!

three

She's growing like a tall tree,

four

As good as gold.

five

 See the happy birthday girl,

six

She's eight...

seven

YEARS OLD!!!

eight

Work Plans for the Week of May 5, 2014: Homeschooling that Isn't

If we're homeschoolers, why are we never at home? We got practically no packing done last week, but we did get to math class and horseback riding, a pizza party at the food pantry where we volunteer, the ballet, our homeschool group's Park Day, and our local hands-on science museum (whose limestone carving hands-on activity has made Will interested in it--must make a note to source scrap limestone and small chisels when we're in the new house). Will went to a Girl Scouts event and chess club. Both kids also had an all-day nature class on Saturday, so Matt and I went to a movie!

Nevertheless, the kids did have acres of time every day to read and listen to audiobooks, often in the company of various cats and/or chickens. There's been a LEGO renaissance around here, so more acres of time have been spent building up elaborate universes, playing in them, and then tearing them down to build another universe. Bug trapping and sidewalk chart drawing  and racetrack building were all major activities, and Will made plans for a lemonade stand, going as far as testing a recipe that, while it did give you tons of energy for about five minutes, had so much sugar in it that it was actually thick. Yum!

The kids also, of course, had math, cursive, and journal assignments every day, and they worked on their International Fair project every day:

I'll tell you later about our DIY chalkboard tri-fold project display. It worked great!

 Will reads the newspaper every day now--

--and not just the comics page, either. She also keeps up steady work on various Girl Scout badges every day, including buying a geocaching travel bug with her own money. She wants it to go to Egypt!

Syd's also been working hard on her Girl Scouts badges. Here's her most recently updated vest, just after I finished muscling a couple more patches onto it (combination of ironing and glue is ALWAYS required, sigh...): 

We haven't made the violet jelly yet, but we've got several batches of violets steeping and ready:

This week, the kids also have math, cursive, and journal every day, along with a daily hands-on project--got to get that violet jelly made, and some work done on our Arkansas unit study, and Syd needs to learn how to shake hands politely and make introductions for her Making Friends Girl Scout badge. Will just finished researching the candidates in our local primary elections and giving me her endorsements, so we're off to walking to our polling place in a minute. Tennis lessons start this week, and now that Syd is eight, she's officially enrolled in aerial silks class! There's a gardening program at the library, and LEGO club, and our homeschool group's Park Day, and math class, and a playdate, and a pottery class on Saturday that, while it won't last long enough for Matt and I to go to a movie this time, WILL last long enough for us to go out to lunch!

I need to make a better effort to integrate packing into our days, but school and play and introspection and reading always seem to take precedence over chores (as they should, right?). I have offered to pay the children $5 for each workbook (math drills, mostly) that they complete so that I don't have to pack and move it, and my other major goal is to organize and pack all of our books all together--Matt says that although, yes, labeling every single non-fiction book with its Dewey Decimal number IS going overboard, he will abide by an organization system based on Dewey's indexing categories.

So both kids will SURELY be able to alphabetize by the end of *that* project, yes?