August is Relaxed

We do school year round, but our summer months are much more unschool-ish. Recently my oldest son spent 3 weeks in the hospital with severe pneumonia so we had our 5 year old granddaughter 24/7. It's more of a challenge to have her, and fully integrate her into our family overall...planning meals is more challenging (She eats as much as any of the adults in the house!), we only have so many of her clothes so we have to do laundry a bit more often (every day pretty much), and she is learning to read. So none of the "older kid" research ideas work for her. She has to be paired with myself, or one of the older children for any and all school work. She is home now, and happy to sleep in her own bed, I imagine! We are all happy her Daddy is on the mend and home again.

I picked up August's monthly Teacher's Book Bag. The theme is The Sun, Seasons and Solar System. It sounded fun, since there are several summery/sun projects. I wish we had light sensitive paper! I am not even sure where one buys that. We have recently switched from lapbooking to notebooking. Maybe it would more accurately be called "Lapbooking in a notebook", lol. So yesterday we took advantage of some of the school supply sales and picke dup some folders (the kind with pockets and brads) for our next few until studies. We learned a great deal about the sun yesterday. It was more interesting than expected for both Artkitty and I, and just as interesting as I expected for Bouncyboy! =)

Today we will be looking at Earth's relationship to the sun, and possibly the Solar System...I haven't totally decided yet since I don't want sit down school work to last more than an hour, 2 at most so we can do more projects and fun stuff!!

Next month we will start our Oklahoma unit! Woot!

Bread Starter Mix Take 1

Making yeast bread from a “starter” or “mother”, making pretty much anything that required fermentation really, has been around for a very long time.

Yeast spores occur everywhere, including the surface of cereal grains, so any dough left to rest will become naturally leavened. Although there is some evidence in the hieroglyphs to suggest that in Egypt, sometime around 1000 BC, the Egyptians isolated wild yeast and were able to introduce the culture directly to their breads. While modern yeasts were developed in the late 1800’s shortly after Louis Pasteur discovered how yeast works, it’s not something most of us think about when enjoying our sweet breads. He used grapes to establish that it was the dust on the surface of the fruit’s skin which made wine ferment, that yeast was a living organism and that only active living cells can cause fermentation.

Basically, fermentation in dough, or bread starter mix, can be described as the breakdown of the starches in flour by the yeast to produce carbon dioxide, which in turn expands the gluten proteins in the flour and causes the dough to expand. Although thanks to Alton Brown, I cannot use any type of yeast without seeing tiny, burping sock puppets inside. =)

Last week we went to my aunt’s house. She had requested help with a recalcitrant printer. Before we left she offered me a “Friendship Bread Starter”. I was delighted to accept! I have kept, fed and cared for bread starters off an on for my entire adult life. My mother had one for a very long time she called “Herman”. I am still unsure how it got that name or where it originated. Mama’s Herman lived in the refrigerator. The yeast (or sourdough) bread starter that I am more familiar with is left on a counter, in a plastic bag.

The basic idea of a bread starter is that you mix it (mash the bag) every day, halfway through a 10 day fermentation process you add milk, sugar and flour, then on the 10th day, you add to your starter, divide it for friends and bake. This time, as I baked my first loaves of bread (blueberry bread, if you are curious) , I thought, “Why not experiment a bit and see if we can’t make this a bit healthier or have less calories/carbs for those of us struggling with weight or diabetes?” Thus the beginning of this experiment was born.

So that would be Day 1 of our 10 day starter. I want to begin by saying that I did not have everything I needed to make my starter AND bake bread. Not having any but organic whole wheat flour and some all purpose flour dregs, I added ½ cup all purpose flour and ½ cup whole wheat flour to the starter, ½ cup of sugar and ½ cup of Splenda, and 1 cup of whole milk. I must pause here and thank my middle son, The Milk Fairy, who dropped off milk that morning on the way to work. Bless him and his little Arby’s uniform with wings!

So already I was playing fast and loose with this starter. Okay, well, perhaps not “fast and loose”, but in my experience with bread starters you do NOT substitute. When I asked why, the response I would usually get was, “Well, you will kill it!”. So, since my starter already had some sugars and flours, etc, I thought that I could potentially just reduce the sugars and give it a wee bit of a different flour that it would be fine. So far, it seems to be (knock on wood). I did have some teeny brown speckles from the wheat flour which was darker than the all purpose flour. When I baked my two loaves I used the organic wheat flour and honey and the blueberry bread was truly wonderful! Although, in hindsight, I think you could use half of each every time it called for flour and you would be fine. That, however, is another experiment!

So today is Day 6. Today I had to add 1 cup each of milk, flour and sugar to my three starter bags.

1. In one bag I measured out and added (with Artkitty and BouncyBoy help) 1 cup of Splenda, 1 cup of milk and 1 cup of all purpose flour. This bag mixed VERY easily, and the mix was very, very pale in color.
2. In the second bag I measured out and added (again with the above helpers) ½ cup of Splenda, ½ cup of sugar, 1 cup of milk and 1 cup of all purpose flour. This bag was more difficult to mix, and surprisingly much darker than Bag 1. The only theory we could come up with to explain this is the difference in consistency between regular white sugar and Splenda. Sugar is much denser. So perhaps the denseness of the sugar creates a color change when the ingredients are mixed.
3. In the third and last bag, I measured out and added (alright, Artkitty and BouncyBoy did with supervision) ¾ cup of local honey, 1 cup of milk and 1 cup of all purpose flour. This proved to be MUCH more difficult to mix together well and darker than Bag 2, and much darker than Bag 1. That was to be expected since the honey itself is a brown color.

The only thing that I did not try was a ½ honey and ½ Splenda combination, although I suspect that it would work very well. You can see the color comparison below.

Days 7, 8 and 9, I will be simply mixing (mashing) each bag. On Day 10 I will again add sweetener, milk and flour to the mixes and divide each up to give away to friends, and bake two loaves of bread from each mix. My plan is to continue adding the same sweetener that I added today for the starters. When I bake I will again use the organic wheat bread (since that worked remarkably well last time) and the same sweeteners, although to be honest I am sorely tempted to bake with the ½ Splenda and ½ honey combo instead of just Splenda.

End of Day 6! Burp, little sock puppet yeast, burp!! =)

Internet yeast/bread history resources:

http://www.breadinfo.com/history.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2791820

http://www.altonbrown.com/
http://www.splenda.com