Copasetic Flow

Four year-old No. Three had a blast at her cooking class today!  That’s right.  I said it.  Unschooling kids take classes.  There’s a common misconception that unschooling kids sit quietly in their homes, learning everything through mere osmosis.  It’s no wonder—given this misconception—that many people think unschooling, ‘Just couldn’t work!’   The difference between kids that are unschooled and those who aren’t, well at least one of the differences, is that unschooling kids only attend the classes they want to. That single small difference in personal control makes for an amazingly large difference in how they interact with the class.  Three is delighted to be in her cooking class.  It’s all grins and giggle from the time she enters class until the time she leaves.  Don’t get the wrong idea though!  Grinning and giggling does not mean she’s goofing off.  Her attention is locked on the instructor’s every word.  She ...

Three-year-old No. 3 got to drop in on a cooking class a few weeks back.  I love San Francisco and the fact that kids can 'pick up' a cooking class thanks to our spectacular Parks & Rec department.  When we ate dinner that night, she beamed, and said she'd had a blast, and also really enjoyed her friends helping her.  To me , this was awesome!  Not only had 3 made friends in a pick up class, she'd worked with them!  This led to two really cool thing!  First, less than ten days later, 3 made her first friend all by herself at our local branch library!  They drew pictures, sang and quietly talked with each other! The second thing that happened was that 3 wanted to make squid!  She'd seen me, along with seven year-old No. 1 and five-year-old No. 2 make it before.  She wanted in on the game.  That weekend, when she and I went to the 'redhat' market, one of our treasured local markets, for our weekly meat, fish and egg run, she asked...

Yum!  These were super-easy, and tasty!  Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen fame, recently posted a recipe for steamed clams .  Given that our butcher/seafood shop—known to us as the redhat because of its red awning—always has a few pounds of clams on-hand at $5/lb, it seemed like a fun way to kill part of our afternoon.  We let the clams spit out all their sand, per the instructions. Clams Spitting out Their Sand Then, we minced and sauteed a bit of shallot and a bit of garlic.  There wasn't any parsley to be found on that particular day, so we skipped it.  We chucked out the chipped clams, and then dumped the rest into the pan.  A few minutes later we began to hear clicking sounds from under the lid.  Peaking in, we found that the clams were opening up, hence the popping.  We plopped the lid back on, and measured the rest of the cooking time using the microwave popcorn method:  when the popping sounds slowed way down, we turned off...

Still trying to ease back into writing as I've been swamped with well... writing, and physics, and learning all about intermediate state superconductors. But, more about all that later. Last night I made a batch of beer bread before going to work. Apparently it came out OK!  Here's the recipe.   Beer Bread recipe:  3 cups Self Rising Flour, (the stuff in the red Gold Medal bag) 3 tablespoons Sugar 1 warm beer Mix it all up, put it in a greased loaf pan and bake for one hour at 350. This is one of the first things I learned to cook as a kid. It's easy and difficult to mess up. In my experience, the cheaper the beer the better, but you should experiment.