Angel Arias Silk Tree Farm 5/9/13
Today as some may have observed, it was rainy and a bit dreary out today. As a result of that, we opted to stay inside for some time (That time lasting until it got better outside later in the day). While we were inside we worked on a few things, I’d previously inquired to Cathy about perhaps using her scale to assist in the weighing of the bags of sugar I would be using in my project. She agreed, so I brought sugar and small sealable bags, as well as the information on about how much sugar was in each beverage that I would be using for comparison in my project. For those of you who don’t know, as part of my project I was going to be leading and teaching a food justice lesson of my own at some point in advisory. I decided that I wanted to get an eclectic of trying to facilitate and lead a discussion on the material I would be teaching, to be actually teaching something worthwhile to the students, and to have an interesting activity for the students to participate in. That activity ended up being organized as having bags of sugar with varying amounts of sugar in each bag, then, having bottles of sugar-containing beverages, again in varying amounts. The object of the activity would be for the students to guess what each bag of sugar corresponded to which beverage/soft-drink and to also have a water bottle (as one of the options) and an empty bag with no sugar, strictly for comparison to the other prevalent beverages. The central ideas would to, 1: Show them how much sugar is in these beverages and make them more aware about what they’re guzzling, and 2: To show them that there are certainly better, healthier alternatives that aren’t likely to hurt you. Now due to what I mentioned earlier, we started working on making a stock, as well as preparing a stock for lunch. After I threw in the vegetables for the stock that was being prepared, I started weighing out the sugars according to each beverage in a bag and marking them off. When I started looking for beverages to include, it surprised that Fuze only held twenty grams of sugar. “Wow,” I thought, “I would have guessed that thing would have been one of the higher-concentrated in sugar beverages.” But little did I know. Cathy told me to look for it’s serving size and check to see if it was “ingredients by serving”, and it was, four serving to a bottle, turning the somewhat innocuous 20 into an unsurprising 80. I had to do that for a few other beverages as well, and a few of them ending up being similar cases. While I was weighing the sugar, I’d noticed Cathy slicing up what looked like sheets of fat from vacuum-sealed packages. She explained that this was the fat from her pigs, and that she was going to use her crockpot to render it into lard. When you render something into lard, you have to do it very slowly and meticulously, because you don’t want the fat to cook; that would ruin it. You want it to slowly melt, not to fry. When I was weighing sugar, I started taking over on slicing the fat since Cathy was busy. I tried cutting through it with scissors, but that was difficult. So I sliced most of the way through with a knife, making a cut track, and then cut through it with scissors, which made it much easier. I then tried to slice through the strips to make chunks, and it worked. But Tom came by and suggested that I instead of the strips upright horizontally, and slice it through it through that way, since I would then be slicing through less rough skin and some fat tissue, equalizing it better than doing it one or the other. I did this for a while, until Cathy returned and we had lunch. Then we headed outside with the intent of raking out the goat pen. Alas, after searching around the goat pen we could not discover a single rake. So we spent a while looking for them, and due to this being a recurring thing, we decided to move all the tools to a secured familiar area. After all that business was done and we actually started raking the goat pen, a horn beeped from the front of the house signaling my departure.
No comments:
Post a Comment