A few years ago, my husband began making biscuits on Saturday mornings. Although not all of his efforts have been equally delicious, we love starch in nearly all of its forms, so we happily ate the not-so-great batches to make room on the table for the even better batches to come. With one exception. The one and only batch of biscuits so horrible no amount of bacon could save them tasted like fluffy metal. How did that happen?
My daughter left me this butter sculpture by the toaster this morning. The more I contemplated it, the more I realized that it was the perfect metaphor for middle school.
When @kristadb1 tweeted that she was going to take a suitcase full of cod tongues home with her from Newfoundland, I had some trouble wrapping my mind around the concept. Cod tongues? Surely that was a secret code word for steak. Fish don’t have tongues. Do they?
Hi all, it’s back to school time here at Caterpickles Central, which means my annual summer hiatus from blogging about the random questions that pop up in our lives is over. It also means that it’s time to bake the annual batch of back-to-school brownies. I normally skip over high altitude baking instructions because they aren’t relevant to my life, but today, for whatever reason, they caught my eye. My brownie mix said to add extra flour and water in high altitude locations and I couldn’t help but wonder why.
If you’re just joining us, last week I learned that jawbreakers can explode when heated in a microwave. This week, I’m going to find out why. What happens in a microwave that makes jawbreakers explode?
In an effort to finally rid the house of leftover Easter candy, I snagged a copy of Loralee Leavitt’s Candy Experiments and began to flip through looking for a way to dispose of all those unwanted Peeps. I hadn’t gotten very far before I found the warning: “Never heat a jawbreaker.” And all I’ve been able to think about since is why. Why can’t you heat a jawbreaker? What happens?
Thinking about composting your potentially E.coli infected romaine? Do me a favor. Don’t. At least not this time around. Here’s why.
It’s Girl Scout cookie season, and that means we get to talk to all sorts of Girl Scout alums about their experience selling cookies back in the day. This week, we met someone who claimed that Thin Mints are not only one of the most popular types of Girl Scout cookies, they’re also one of the oldest. So of course, we had to know: Were Thin Mints really only the third Girl Scout cookie to be introduced?
Every time we go to the farmer’s market I try to find at least one fruit or vegetable we’ve never had before. This week, we stumbled across a pale green cauliflower-shaped vegetable made of fractals. So of course, we took it home and roasted it.
The holidays have finally struck here at Caterpickles Central. I wasn’t entirely sure it was going to happen this year, seeing as how there are still flowers blooming outside our front door, but I chaperoned The Ten-Year-Old’s field trip to see The Nutcracker last week, and now I’ve got questions about sugar plums dancing in my head. What is a sugar plum, and why does it get its own fairy?
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