Edible Animal Cells

To wrap up our cell unit Doodle Bug made an edible model of an animal cell.  I spent some time looking for ideas online and found most were made using a cookie or cake of some sorts as the base.  While cookies are okay, the end result looks pretty inedible - not something you're going for when the title of your project is edible animal cell, right?  We knew we wanted something round (because it's a well known fact that all good animal cells are round) and something that could have a lot of components but still taste good.  The final verdict was pizza and what a fine choice it was!  On our pizza cell above (sorry, we only have one picture, Doodle Bug's phone ate the rest) we have

• Crust - cell wall
• Ranch & mozzarella - cytoplasm
• Large Canadian bacon round - nucleus
• Onion round - nucleolus
• Mitochondria - Canadian bacon bits
• Vacuoles - green peppers
• Lysomes - bacon
• Ribosomes - cheddar cheese
• Rough ER - mushrooms with ribs
• Smooth ER - mushrooms without ribs
• Golgi apparatus - onion

Before putting the pizza all together Doodle Bug went over our cell diagrams in our science notebooks to be sure that all of the parts were accounted for.  Just in case you are wondering, no, this pizza does not have red sauce.  Instead we used ranch dressing - it may sound gross but it tastes great.  When I worked at my dad's pizza joint (many moons ago) this was how I made my pizzas.

If you are going to make your own version of this at home, feel free to mix up the pizza toppings.  You can add in some black olives, other colors of bell pepper and some cooked hamburger.  Just as a word of caution - ranch does not taste so good when mixed with pepperoni or sausage (but creamy Italian dressing would work just fine with them).

Life Skills Lessons - Making Japanese Soup

Doodle Bug LOVES to go out for Japanese Hibachi, and it's mainly for the soup (which makes for some pretty expensive soup!).  For our first cooking lesson Doodle Bug wanted to try making a version of this soup at home.  We found a recipe online (thank you, pintrest) and doubled it (which was hubby's idea for adding in some practical math - kudos to hubs).  Here is the recipe we found online:

• 4 cups chicken broth
• 2 cups water
• 1 white onion
• 1/2 celery stalk, coarsely chopped
• 1/2 carrot, coarsely chopped
• salt to taste
• 1 cup vegetable oil
• 1 cup flour
• 4 medium mushrooms, thinly sliced
• 4 green onion, diced

Combine chicken stock and water in sauce pot over med high heat. Slice the onion in half and coarsely chop one half and reserve the other.

Add the coarsely chopped onion, carrot, celery and salt to sauce pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer 20 minutes.

While broth simmers heat veg. oil in small sauce pot over med. heat. Slice remaining onion into thin slices. Separate the slices, dip them into the milk and then into the flour. Fry until lightly browned. Drain on a paper towel.

After soup is done simmering strain veggies out of the broth and toss them. Pour the broth back into pan then leave on low heat to keep warm until ready. Garnish with fried onion, mushroom slices and green onions.We did alter the recipe a bit - like I mentioned before we did double it and once it was done it seemed, well, bland.  Basically, even with a whole onion in it there wasn't a lot of onion flavor - there wasn't a lot of any flavor.  So, to make it more like the Japanese soup we have at the restaurant we add in soy sauce - in our double recipe it was close to an eighth of a cup.  I know that sounds like a lot, but there were 12 total cups of liquid to dilute it.  Doodle Bug (who is a soy sauce fanatic) seems to think there should be a little more, so I would add this to your personal taste.  We only fried about one quarter of an onion - and still had more than enough.  Next time, we will only use a few tablespoons of flour (as we threw out almost all of it).  Also, Doodle Bug does not like mushrooms so those were left off the garnish list.

All in all, the soup was a hit with our alterations, but not so much as it.  This was actually a very valuable lesson - it's good to know how to follow a recipe, but it's also important to not be afraid of adapting things to your own tastes.