Australian Sausage Rolls

Belle was challenged this week by Grandma to bake something that was not dessert, so she flipped through her kid cookbook of global cuisine again and found a recipe for sausage rolls. Puff pastry and sausage? Yum. Mama did a little digging, though, because it looked like it had probably been simplified a bit from traditional preparation. And yes, it had. Apparently, Australian mums use sausage rolls as a way to sneak vegetables into their children’s meals and I am all about that, ladies. Grating carrots is a good gross motor activity anyway.

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Banana-Oat Pancakes (Gluten-free, Dairy-free)

Growing up, summer Sunday mornings meant my Grandpa was making dozens of pancakes from Bisquick and old milk for his grandchildren. He’d take special requests for blueberry pancakes, or for pancakes shaped like letters, or for simply more – there are pancake eating records next to various water sport records in the family record book. But as much as we love Bisquick, sometimes we crave something marginally healthier or that we can eat with friends who have dietary restrictions. And thus, sometimes we make banana-oat pancakes.

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Snow Ice Cream

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This winter has had more and better snowstorms than the past several years, so we hopped on a bandwagon a few weeks ago and made some ice cream out of fresh-fallen snow. It’s delicious. Also, it reminds me of Little House in the Big Woods, where Laura Ingalls Wilder had hot maple syrup over snow. I’ve been meaning to try that for probably thirty years, and this is as close as I’ve gotten.

Anyway.

Bring on the snow! (But not the grass. Grass does not taste good in ice cream. Nor does dirt.)

Snow ice cream is best made with very fresh snow – not the snow that fell two days ago, not the first inch of snow (which knocks pollutants out of the air), not anything on top of driveways or manure or within range of the plow. We let it start snowing in the morning, then put a big stock pot out in the yard to catch the rest of the day’s snow. When the snow slowed in the afternoon and the pot was largely full, we topped it off and brought it inside.

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Spatial Visualization

I’m using “spatial visualization” as a parent-friendly term, though really, the concept is more clearly divided in science between object rotation and observer perspective shifting. The first is the ability to mentally rotate a 2-D or 3-D object and see where it fits – this is your ability to find an upside-down jigsaw puzzle piece on the table and know it fits in the spot you have in mind. It also covers the mental folding necessary to see how a flat sheet of cardboard can be folded into a box, and the mental slicing to know that two slices of a sphere will be (most likely) two differently sized circles. The second is the ability to stand at the corner of a house and mentally place yourself in front of the house and know what that will look like. At least, those tasks have been studied for a long time and there are clear differences in reaction time between those two fields.

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