Pudding Like a Night on the Sea

As part of The Boy’s reading lesson last week we read Pudding Like a Night on the Sea by Ann Cameron. 

It is a realistic fiction story about two brothers up to mischief. Julian and Huey watch their father make a special pudding as a treat for their mother. Their father says it “tastes like a raft full of lemons” and “like a night on the sea.” The boys are supposed to wait for their mother to come home but they secretly taste the pudding thinking, “Well, a little bit won’t hurt.”  And as we all know a little bit almost always turns into A LOT! As punishment, their father says that there will be some “beating” and “whipping.”  Uh Oh! But they end up having to make another pudding for their mother by “beating” and “whipping” the eggs until their arms hurt.  The illustrations are so colorful and the descriptions so engaging, that The Boy was inspired to write down the recipe.  He then typed and designed it on the computer. Here it is:

The Pudding Like a Night on the Sea

Ingredients

*5 Lemons

 *eggs

* sugar

* cream

Directions

Squeeze the lemons. Put the yolks in a pan and the whites in a bowl. Beat yolks. Add sugar. Lemons, and cream. Put on the stove. Stir fast. Whip the egg whites. Mix into the pudding.

Not much to go on but priceless, don't you think?

So we looked up a lot of other recipes and came up with this:

 Ina Garten’s Lemon Mousse 

The part that mattered most? We all made it together-The Boy squeezed the lemons and whipped the cream. The Girl learned to separate the eggs and beat the whites to a stiff peak. Then we all put our parts together to make this:

Beautiful, foamy, tart, fluffy, and it tasted like "a whole raft of lemons floating at sea".

Prehistoric Times

We have a new addition to our brood! Good news-doesn’t require feeding of any sort.  Bad news-I already broke its neck.  Announcing . . . Woolly-the Woolly Mammoth! 

Isn’t he cute?  This was a very cool “homeschool style” project for The Boy.  He just completed a science unit on Living Things of the Past and fossils.  We He became fascinated with the Woolly Mammoth so he completed an animal report with pictures and tons of facts.

Homeschool Style

The Boy is homeschooled.  We are fairly new to the process but it fits right in with our hippy “Montessori” household (in quotes because we do not follow the philosophy but it is what some people like to call our parenting style).  It has not been unusual for our house to be dominated by the interests and current obsessions of the The Girl and The Boy.  I don’t mind the clutter of legos, art projects, experiments, and inventions of all types. It is what matters most to us.  So even prior to our adventure in homeschool, our house was a place of fun, learning, and discovery but not always of neurotic impeccable neatness.  Now that we homeschool The Boy, we like to call it “Homeschool Style”.