HE: Pond dipping

A couple of months ago the home education group we regularly attend organised a pond dipping session.

Here are some pictures and videos of this session.

Recipe: Pita breads

These breads are on of our family favourites. We use them with many dishes that have an origin in the middle eastern area.

My kids love stuffing them with all kinds of other foods as well. They like putting tuna mayo and egg mayo in them. They also like slicing them open, putting a slice of ham on there, top it with a slice of cheese and then put it under the broiler, so that the cheese melts. Tastes very nice.

So in all they are very, very versatile.

Origin: Middle east

Difficulty: easy

Time: couple of hour, which includes rising times

Serves: 6

Yield: 6 pieces

Vegetarian

Equipment:

• bread baking machine (optional)
• oven
• bowl

Ingredients:

• 350 gram / 3 cups / 12 ounces sprouted flour
• 1 tsp rapid-rise yeast
• 1 tsp sucanat
• 1,5 tsp celtic sea salt
• 210 ml / 1 cup / 7.5 fl. ounces milk
• 1 tbsp olive oil

Things to do ahead:

• soak your grains, so that they sprout, then dehydrate them and grind them

Directions:

• place all ingredients in the bread baking machine and put it on the dough cycle and turn on, alternatively.
• place all ingredients in a bowl and make nice dough out of it. Leave it to rise until doubled in size.
• Preheat your oven to 230 C / 450 F / Gas 8. Place a pizza stone or baking stone in there when you have one. It gives a better result as the oven keeps a more constant temperature.
• Take your dough out of the bread baking machine or bowl and knock it back.
• Divide into 6 equal balls
• Roll them into shape with a rolling pin.
• Put a tea towel over them and leave to rise for about 10 minutes.
• Once they have risen a bit bake them on the stone. You may need to do this in more than 1 batch as it depends on how many fit on your stone. 
• In case you do not have a stone you can put them all on a cookie sheet and bake them that way.

Possible substitutions:

1. dairy - coconut
2. butter - coconut, tallow, etc.
3. sugar - hone

Recipe: Cajun chicken

Our family loves roasted chicken, so I try to make it in many types of ways as possible. And here is another way. It's a child friendly recipe. My children love it. Usually I serve roasted vegetables, such a carrots, parsnips and swede with roasted potatoes with it. The best part about that is that you can put the chicken at the top shelf and the vegetables with potatoes in 1 oven dish on the bottom shelf in your oven and it is all done at the same time. I put the vegetables at the bottom of the dish and the potatoes at the top, so they get some more crunch to them.

Origin: Louisiana maybe. I don't really know, but I use a cajun spice mix.

Difficulty: easy
Time: 2 hours in total from start to finish, but that is including the 1h30m in the oven, so 30 minutes real work
Serves: 6
Yield: 6 pieces 
Traditional/GAPS/SCD legal, Primal, Paleo

Equipment:

• Oven
• 1 oven dish
• 1 roemer topf or a oven dish with a lid

Ingredients:

• 1 chicken of about 2 kg
• 1 jar of cajun spice mix of Steenbergs
• 1 bunch of thyme
• celtic sea salt
• black pepper

Things to do ahead:
1 day ahead - defreeze chicken
1 hour ahead - soak your roemer topf and take your chicken out of the fridge and let it come to room temperature

Directions:

• Preheat your oven to 180C/350F/Gas4
• Put your chicken in the roemer topf.
• Cut your lemon in half and cut one half again. The other half you squeeze out over your chicken. The other 2 you squeeze out into the cavity and put the squeezed lemons inside.
• Put the part of the thyme inside and part under your chicken.
• Spread about 2 tablespoons of cajun spice mix over your chicken on all sides. Massage it in well.
• Close the lid of your roemer topf.
• Put your roemer topf into the oven for 1 hour.
• After the hour take the lid off your roemer topf. Put up the heat to 220C/430F/Gas7. Pour the cooking juices as well as you can over the chicken.
• Leave the chicken in for another 20 to 30 hours. Depending on how heavy your chicken has been. When it's somewhat under 2 kilos 20 minutes is usually enough. When it is over 2 kilos 30 minutes is often necessary.
• Make sure your chicken is cooked well by checking whether the juices run clear.
• Take your chicken out of the oven, put the lid back on the roemertopf and leave it standing for 30 minutes to an hour to rest.
• Take the bones out of the chicken and let the chicken absorb the juices a bit.

Enjoy!

Education: Learning how to learn.

A couple of months ago I joined my husband in his start-up business and took over the office management and marketing side of things. Office management was no problem as I have many years of experience as a secretary, executive secretary and such.
However, marketing was a bit different as I only had a little bit of experience in that from a couple of temporary jobs that I recently had. None of it was very extensive.
So, I decided I should do some courses on marketing and learn more about it. This way I would be better capable of doing the job. I looked online and found some marketing courses on Coursera. After reading through them, I decided I'd like to see whether I would get on with the platform and such first, before actually taking the plunge into the real stuff. Therefore, I did a few courses on nutrition as that is something I'm familiar with and didn't have to put a lot of effort in. I enjoyed the two courses very much. I didn't really learn much from them, so doing the quizzes was easy and I had the maximum score each time.

After having decided that this platform was going to work well for me I signed up for the marketing course I had chosen. But then I noticed that as the material was quite new to me, it was actually a lot harder than the nutrition courses. And in all honesty, I hadn't really done any formal learning in new areas for about 30 years. I had kept up with my interests, but I had done nothing really new and this marketing stuff was quite new to me.
As I struggled a bit, I realised that the way I had been taught to learn in school wasn't really working well for this. and I got very frustrated.
Then I got an email from Coursera and there I read about the course "Learning how to learn" [1]. That sparked my interest as I figured that in the last 30 years the ideas on learning may have totally changed from what I was taught in school and how I was taught the material. I expected that I would get some good ideas from it and expected it would teach me better ways of learning than what I had been doing my whole life.
Well.... this proved to be fully true. I learned so much! I cannot recommend this course enough. The teacher Barbara Oakley is awesome. She speaks clear, calm and is overall very motivating.

There are 4 weeks lessons and there are quizzes at the end of each the lesson. In between the videos there are also practise quizzes. The videos are very clear and the practise quizzes really help to get to know the material well. 

Barbara Oakley also wrote a book, called "A mind for numbers". This book is the companion to this course and goes into the various bits in a bit more depth. It is absolutely fascinating [2]

Lessons 1 and 3 have an honours assignment, which is optional. The honours assignment of lesson 1 I enjoyed and therefore I did that one.
The honours assignment of lesson 3 was quite a different thing for me. but as I want to get the most out of this course, I feel that have to do the honours assignment for lesson 3 as well, however daunting.
Unfortunately it is something totally new to me, so I ended up getting very stressed about it. But because of all the things taught in the course I actually managed to write this blog post, as this is what I am doing for the honours project of lesson 3.
This post was written in half an hour chunks as I thought I couldn't do it, it was too much, it was, daunting and scary, it was more than I could ever do. But broken down in chunks of half an hour it did slowly start to take shape. For me this time, at least twice a day, worked out fine. I will keep using that strategy for anything difficult in the future as it helps me to calm down and do little bits that I can oversee. [3]
I have been using the learned techniques to get past my fear and getting through the writing of this post. I used techniques such as chunking, interleaving, using the focused and diffuse mode of thinking amongst others.

I would like to explain to you a few things of what I have learned in this course, so that you get a bit of an impression what this course is all about and what you could get out of it.

Chunking
During my learning process I have started using this system called chunking. It had never occured to me, but this is a totally natural way of learning. Babies and children learn everything this way. When they start learning to speak they initially learn to say a word, but don't really know all the connections or the meaning, they just copy and paste it into their brain and they will repeat it days on end, just to get a proper grip on it. And after a while it is totally natural to them, they know what it means, the connections and all there is to know about the word.
I'll try to explain what it is, as it is quite nifty. I actually had no idea that the brain worked in that way.
A chunk you can compare to a puzzle piece. So basically you learn the stuff that you need to learn in bits and pieces, like puzzle pieces. Initially that may not all make a load of sense, as it may take a bit for your brain to sort through all those pieces to connect them. But when you keep learning the bits in chunks, and of course you will have to repeat the important parts several times and over several days, as you need to strengthen your brain muscles. Just reading something once isn't going to make you retain it. So you divide what you need to learn over the time that you have to learn it in, and take regular breaks. The breaks are also really important. For my learning I use a system called pomodoro. This gives me 25 minutes of concentrated work time and a 5 minute break. Most of the time this works really well for. After a four of pomodoro sessions there is a longer break, which is 15 minutes. Of course you can change this, in case it works better for you to take a longer break after 2 sessions. This is just the way Francesco Cirillo came up with it in the late 1980s and it works for me [4]. Some people take different times, which is in most apps easy to change.

Pomodoro
This is how the technique works.

• Decide on what you need to do. 
• Set a timer for 25 minutes (or whatever else you feel is right for you) 
• Work until the timer goes. In case something pops up in your head, write it down quickly and continue concentrating on the task at hand.
• When the timer goes, mark where you were and take a short break, usually 5 minutes. After 4 pomodoros, you take a longer break, usually 15 mnutes.
• Repeat this process.

I don't always end up making 4 pomodoros due to time constraints, but even when I just do 2 per day, it changes things for the better for me. I get to concentrate on my work, using my focused mode of thinking and during the breaks I just let go, letting my diffuse mode of thinking take over. Sometimes after those breaks I actually start seeing things in a better way, or connect things, which wouldn't have happened had I kept on focussing. I just love doing this. 

Interleaving
This is jumping back to revisit and deepen my understanding of a topic that I have already covered. A palaeolithic flint-napper didn't learn how to do it in 1 go. He/she would sit and train for years and years to perfect his/her skill. Present day flint-nappers haven't been able to get to that level of skill yet. The smooth repetition creates muscle memory, so the body knows what to do from a single thought. These days we do the same with driving a car or riding a bicycle. This happens as we recall one chunk, which ties all the other chunks of the complex steps involved together to perform the job at hand, be it flint-napping, driving or riding a bicycle.

Procrastination
With procrastination you want to make sure that you do not have to use all your willpower to conquer it. That would take a lot from a person. It is better to just use a little willpower to get over it. This you can achieve by first dividing the job at hand in little jobs that you can oversee, that won't get you too stressed and worried. You wouldn't climb the mount everest in one blow either. 
Then you make sure that after every bit that you do, you reward yourself for a job well done. It doesn't have to be much, a bit of gaming, a cookie or whatever you like really. What can be another good idea is to make appointments with yourself to do the job at hand once or twice a day in, say, half an hour sessions, or 25 minute pomodoro sessions. You can time that for yourself and then reward yourself afterwards. When you plan to do it that way it will all get done bit by bit and it will not be so exhausting and stressful. Writing this post I have done that way, as it seemed like a huge mountain to me. I was convinced I couldn't do it. And yet here we are.

Sleep
During sleep the cells in your brain shrink a little so that all the toxins built up during the day can pass through easily and be disposed of. This is very beneficial to learning and test taking. A clean brain does its work so much the better than a brain which hasn't been able to do this. That is why sleep is very important to learning and to test taking. So from now on get enough sleep before you do a heavy bit of learning or you need to take a test. Staying up late and trying to cram it all in isn't going to do you any favours.

Imposter syndrome
The most important thing I got out of this course is that anyone can learn anything and at high levels. I have always suffered from the Imposter syndrome, where I think that I am not in the right place and am really not cut out for what I am learning. But in this course I learned that many people feel that way, even many real academics. Many people think that they did well for this test, or during this class, but next time it will all go wrong and then everyone will know that they are an imposter. It was fascinating hearing very skilled academics talk about this in the optional video interviews. 
One of the academics interviewed was talking about how he addresses it in a lecture at some point and then while doing his talk he sees people's faces change in recognition and then start looking around and then most people in the room have the same change in their faces that they recognise this feeling. 

References:
[1] All of the above information comes from the Coursera Learning how to learn course
[2] A mind for numbers - Barbara Oakley
[3] Interview with Dr. Richard Felder & Dr. Rebecca Brent video 3 of lesson 4 & effective teaching
[4] Pomodoro - wikipedia

cooking at home

homade made chicken doener, pita breads, garlic sauce & vegetables

As I am doing several courses at the moment I do not have a lot of time on my hands to waste on all kinds of stuff. But I do still cook for my family, I like cooking and baking, so most days I make all the meals from scratch for my family.

Home made chocolate cake with white chocolate buttercream

Because of the courses that I do, 2 on nutrition and 1 on marketing, I have come to a realisation. Most people these days are very heavily influenced by the marketing and advertisements of food companies. Those companies want to sell their unhealthy products and make a lot of money. They had to create market. Itt is in their benefit to make making food seem like it is a LOT of work, NO FUN and very DIFFICULT. And NONE of that is true. Making food isn't a lot of work, actually when you learn how to do it well, as our ancestors did. For me that would be my parents and grandparents, but depending on which country you are from and how your family was, it may be that neither your parents and maybe not even your grandparents made most foods from scratch. So when you've grown up with that you may not be aware of the easy, time savings, money savings and the fun that it can be. I know a few families where food is rarely cooked as nobody has a proper clue on how to do things and they haven't learned in school either. It is quite sad at times to hear people talk about food. I also know of families where cooking isn't done because it would make the kitchen dirty or any of those ideas, it's really really a sad state of affairs.

So, despite having 4 home educated kids, doing 3 different courses and helping out my husband in his business I still make our food most days of the week. My husband does some other days and every now and then one of my kids makes food. It works out quite nicely this way. We also make sourdough bread, sauerkraut and other ferments. That doesn't mean it all always goes smooth, but it mostly does. It has actually been quite a while ago that we had take-away. We do occasionally have some pizza's or so, which are pre-made and we only have to bake in the oven. But my kids prefer home made pizza, so that is a rarity as well. I think in the last 2 months it happened once. And take-away is even longer ago.

When making your own food you have so many more possibilities than you have with processed foods. A pizza can have any type of topping you want. When I make home made pizza. I use 2 large baking sheets and put the dough on that - there are 7 mouths to feed in our house at present - then I put the pizza sauce (home made) on top and from there we have a selection of choices. Everyone can have some input. Frequently I make 2 different pizza's so that everyone is happy. And lastly we put the cheese on top. We rarely have left overs.
And then there is the pizza from the Alsace, which i learned about in Switzerland, flammkuchen. That is so tasty! It just has a sour cream / double cream topping, then onions and bacon bits on there and it goes in the oven. That also disappears very quickly and is so easy to make!

Futhermore there are any number of ways to make meats, roast, cook, fry, whatever. Any number of spices can be used to flavour them. For me garlic and onions are always on any meat. As that just makes it all so very tasty.

Vegetables. there is no limit on how you can make them. So much fun.

So despite the fact that the food companies have tried their best to make everyone think it is too much work, too difficult and no fun. I actually am convinced they are totally wrong. They are only doing this to sell their products. They have indoctrinated people into thinking this and it is patently not true. Making food is loads of fun. Especially when you do it together with family members. I prefer only have a few with me. Having 7 people in the kitchen isn't a workable situation LOL.
But having 1 or 2 people with me is really nice, you can chat about the day, or - as my husband and i often do - have a business meeting while preparing dinner.
And it is so much more tasty. You can use so many different natural ways to flavour your food. When I make chicken korma I make it the way I like it. The way I have had it from the take-away was quite a disappointment, as it also was from the supermarket. Loads of salt and not enough flavour. I have read up on korma dishes and found that the spices are where it is at. In India spices are the big thing anyway. We do not like the extreme hot spiciness from India, but we do like food from India. So when I make a dish from India I use less burn and keep the flavour.

Making soups is really easy as well. You can use any number of meats and vegetables and even mix them. You can blend or not. Whatever you like. I have a friend who tends to make a soup with the leftovers of the previous day and add some flavour that fits and there it is. Nothing difficult about that. She does always have home made broth going. So do I. There is always a broth going on the cooker or in the slow cooker.

Oh... and then the slow cooker. The most wonderful tool in the kitchen. Any stew and soup can be made in that. Cut the evening before. Keep in the fridge. Put in the slow cooker in the morning, and your dinner is done by the evening. How easy is that!

Now that I am so much more busy we actually pre-cut most of our foods on the weekend. This includes lettuce and such. The best way to keep all vegetables is in the fridge, all in separate bags or boxes. Meats all go in the freezers. I plan my meals ahead, so I know which vegetables keep longer and can be used later in the week. Some parts, that require that, we precook on the weekend already and then put in the fridge or freezer. I also make all my salad dressings on the weekend already, they keep just find in a former jam jar or such.

I recently read that Michael Pollan has said in an interview that he thinks that it is very difficult to get obese on home cooked food and I think he is very right with that. The people that I know that are doing a lot of home cooking are definitely not obese. Some may be a bit overweight, but none are to points where it becomes a big problem for their health.

I also think it is very important to teach children to cook. Mine are invited to be with me / us in the kitchen to help out from very young onward. My youngest is no 8, but she has been very good with even knives from about 6 onward. We have always let them help and all of them are very good with making foods. They all have their preferences, which is actually quite a blessing. It gives us a lot of variety. It is amazing to see the preferences between my husband, my oldest children and myself creating so many different types of foods and all similarly tasty.

My children do all loves hamburgers, pizza's, kebabs and all those things. There is no reason for them not to eat it. We just make it at home, unless there is a special occasion. But even then some of my children prefer the home cooked version.

So this is all really not that difficult when you look at it. In case you want me to talk more about specific parts of cooking at home. Please feel free to ask.