calcite

I went to work with my dad at a complex called sheerwater to fix the irrigation, while I was there I was looking at the rocky landscape around the houses. The complex was put in the side of a mountain and a lot of rock needed to be blasted out. In some places we were probably 10 meters under ground in some places. I decided to check out the cliff face which ran along one side of the complex. The cliff face was very crumbly and weak. I found bits of rock that looked like impure calcite crystals because they had a slight square shape to them. So I kept on looking until I found some very pure calcite crystals and some clusters of thin sheet like crystals that looked almost like Muscovite. I collected some samples of the calcite to test later. I put a few drops of HCl on the calcite and it bubbled up confirming that it was calcite that I found

beans and rice 2

We started out by chopping up onions, peppers, garlic, wieners, and tomato's. Then we put them all in a pot with a little bit of oil and fried them up. Once every thing was cooked, we added two cups of beans to the vegetables and let them cook for a bit. Once that was done, we started on the rice by putting two cups of water in a pot and bringing it to a boil. After it stated boiling, we added a cup of rice and tomato powder and put a lid on it. That's when we made the tortillas. We measured out two cups of corn flour and put it in a mixing bowl. Then we added water and salt. After kneading the dough for a while we made the dough into 16 little balls. We had a special tool that can flatten the balls into a flat round circle. We put a pan on the stove and turned it on high. We then placed the rolled dough on the pan to cook. After they were all ready, we ate everything together. It all tasted really good. The tortillas were hollow in the middle so we could open them up and put the rice and beans inside the tortillas. I cant wait to make it again some time.

5 hours of volunteer work

I spent my 5 hours of volunteering at the Fat Cat Children's Festival.

Most of my time was spent cutting out cat noses, dragon ears, and eye brows from construction paper. The kids would use these body parts to make hand puppets. It's pretty safe to say that if I was ever going to do that again, I would have to be a hobo being paid a lot of money to do it, or else become Edward Scissorhands. My hands were quite sore after all that cutting so I really hope the children appreciated it. On a positive note, my group was in a tent like structure which protected us from the little bit of rain we had as well as the wind.
It wasn't my idea to do this kind of volunteer work but my school planned it.
What I did last year was dinging trenches.

cookies

chocolate chip cookies
First we mixed flour,oatmeal, and baking soda in a bowl. Then we combined butter and shortening.
Then we added sugar to the butter mixture and beat it. Next we added eggs and vanilla.
After that we added the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mixed it up well.
Then we added the chocolate chips to the mix and stirred them in. After that was finished we rolled the dough into little balls and put them in the oven for about 10 minutes.
They turned out really well and tasted really good.
I would probably make them again.

Cappuccino cookies
First we mixed butter, coco powder, brown sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, and instant coffee powder.
Then after everything was mixed we added some egg white, yogurt, and flour.

We poured some white sugar and cinnamon in a bowl and rolled the dough into little balls. Then we rolled the balls in the white sugar and cinnamon and placed them on a baking sheet. We baked them for 10 minutes and took them out.
At first when we took them out they were really soft, but after sitting out for a while they became more hard.
These were probably the best cookies that we made. I am planning on making them again soon.

Apple pie

First we put flour and salt in a bowl and mixed them together. Then we cut in some shortening until it was just little bits of shortening with flour surrounding them. Next we added some water and kneaded it until it became dough. Then we put the dough in the fridge over night. The next day we cut the dough into two parts. The first part we rolled out and put on a pie plate and the second part we put aside. After that we started on the apple filling, for that we mixed lemon juice, white sugar, brown sugar, salt, Cinnamon, nutmeg, flour, and chopped up apples in a bowl. Then we willed the pie plate with the apple mixture and put a sheet of dough on top of it.
Then we put the pie on a baking sheet and put it in the oven. We put it in the oven for 15 minutes on high temperature, and then put it in again for 45 minutes on a lower temperature. when we took it out it was brown and crispy and it tasted really good. All it needed was some ice cream to go on top. I will probably make it again some time in the future.  

Apple tart

We rolled out a block of puff pastry and cut it into four circles. Then we chopped up some apples into small cubes and added some cinnamon, nutmeg, and brown sugar to them.
Next we put the apples on the pastry and put them in the oven for about 20 minutes.
When we took them out, the dough had puffed up and become really crispy, and they tasted really good.
I would definitely make these again.

rice and beans

                             
                                                                  Rice and Beans.
First we fried unions and peppers in a pot, then we added garlic. Once they were cooked we added some tomato paste, black beans, oregano, cumin, bay leafs, and vinegar. We cooked them together for about five minutes. then we added vegetable stock, salt and pepper, and rice. We let it boil for a bit, then we turned down the heat and let it sit for 20 minutes or so. Once the rice was cooked we took it out of the pot and tried it. It could have used some more beans then it had, I was defiantly expecting more beans, but it was still good besides that.  I am probably going to make it again.

fuit pizza

                                                                fruit pizza
We spent 2 days making the fruit pizza. The first day we made the sugar Cookie dough and the second day we made the cream cheese sauce and finished the pizza.

We rolled out the dough for the crust and placed it on a pan. Then we baked it for 20 minutes or so.
Meanwhile we made the cream cheese topping. We mixed a block of cream cheese with icing sugar, and then we mixed in vanilla to give it some flavor.
When the crust came out of the oven we let it cool for 10 to 20 minutes. After that we spread the sauce all over it and then cut up grapes, strawberries, and other fruit and put them on top.
we also fried up some apples with butter, Cinnamon, and brown sugar to put on top.
I didn't think I would really like it but it was surprisingly good. I will probably make this again.

Coffee cake

Coffee cake

For the coffie cake We started with mixing flour, cinnamon, and sugar. Then we cut in the butter until it was like crumbs. We took out a cup of the crumbs for later. After that we added eggs and vanilla. Then we mixed it until it was smooth.  Next we added more flour, baking powder, and baking soda. Then we mixed in the apple sauce and stirred it until it was smooth. We poured the batter into a buttered pan, and we sprinkled the crumbs on top of it and put it in the oven.

It tasted much better than I expected it to, and It had the same texture of carrot cake.

I would defiantly make this cake again.

The Amish

History

The Amish came from the 16th century fellowship known as the Swiss brethren, The Swiss Brethren were Anabaptist, which were a part of the reformation. Anabaptist means "one who baptizes again". In the early 18th century, many Amish and Mennonites moved to Pennsylvania to escape persecution. Today, most of the Amish decedents continue to speak Pennsylvania German, even still today. 

The Amish are very family oriented, Amish believe that it is a blessing from god to haves a large family. The purposes of family can be shown within the Amish culture in lots of different ways. The family has control over the lower generations throughout their life. Ironically a church district is measured by the number of families, rather than by the number of actual baptized members, that's how important family is to them. Families always like to hold a weekly worship service, but every week it is held by a different family. They say that they are responsible to God for how spiritual their kids are

Rumspringa
When an Amish teenager turns 16 they are sent out to experience the "English world".
The teenagers leave their Amish community and go looking to have fun. but when they return they will have to choose whether or not they want to stay in there community or leave it for good
while they are off having fun, many of them end up drinking and doing drugs like Methamphetamine or marijuana and then decide not to go back to their community

Technology
The Amish have a very simplistic life style, they don't really encourage wearing  fashionable clothing, or having stylish hair cuts. everything to them is to be plain and simple. The Amish prohibit the use of anything that uses electricity which includes, automobiles, computers, and even cellphones or home phones. The people can still find ways around their rules, if they know someone with a car they will still drive in it, but only because they are not the ones driving.  The Amish typically travel by horse and cart.  They are hard workers and do most things manually because of their opposition to technology.  

The resources I used are the devils playground which is a documentary about Amish people,I watched several episodes of breaking Amish which is a TV documentary about how kids are leaving the Amish community, and I did lots of internet research about the Amish  and I spent some time watching you-tube videos about them, to learn more about them I think it would be a good idea to actually spend a day in an Amish community, and really get to see what they are like.







Devils Playground-77 minutes

Breaking Amish-2 hours

you tube videos-1.5 hours

Online research 1.9 hours

pie

We started off with making the pie crust. for this we mixed flow butter, shortening and salt together kneaded it up and rolled it out.
For the filling we started with chopping potatoes up into small chunks.
We boiled them in a chicken broth mixture and we also added a mixture of corn starch, soy sauce, and water. We boiled them together until it got really thick. Then we lined a pie plate with the pie crust and poured the filling in. After we put the filling on the pie we put another sheet of rolled out dough on top of the pie and put it in the oven. When it got out it looked really good, the crust was nice and crispy, besides the potatoes being a bit hot it was very good.



Greek roasted potatoes

For the Greek roasted potatoes we mixed together, oil, water, salt, Greek seasoning, and chicken flavored seasoning.
after mixing that all together we chopped up potatoes into quarters, and also unions. We put the potatoes and unions in a pan and added some garlic cloves, and then poured in the mixture of spices in water.
We put it in the oven for 40 mutates and then took it out. Most of the water had boiled out and there was just the oil left on the bottom.

cookies

We started with making brown sugar cookies, all we did is just mix butter egg brown sugar vanilla and butter
and then ad that mixture to flour and baking powder.
Once we kneaded it into a ball we rolled it out, cut it with cookie cutters, and baked it. The cookies turned out really brown and a bit burned.
The next Bach we made was using normal sugar instead of brown sugar, the dough was a much lighter color, and they turned out much better.
For Bach number 3 we used soft margarine instead of butter, these cookies didn't turn out nearly as good. The dough was really oily and crumbly, and we couldn't use cookie cutters on the dough because it would fall apart when we tried to move it, so we just rolled them into balls and flattened them onto the pan, They didn't taste very good either.
The last ones we made were the half apple sauce and half egg ones. these cookies turned out the best, they had more flavor then any other cookies that I tried.
Even the full apple sauce ones didn't taste as good,
unfortunately I didn't get to taste all of everyone's cookies but I did try a lot of them.

Gnocchi

Making gnocchi is an incredibly easy task. All it really involves is, making mashed potato's, adding one egg, adding flour to the potato, and mixing it in until it is a dough. usually when I make gnocchi at home I don't follow a recipe, I just mix in flour to the potato's until it feels like a good consistency and they usually turn out perfect.
So after making the dough we rolled it into long rolls and sliced the rolls into bouncy ball sliced pieces. Then we took a fork and pushed it in the pieces leaving an imprint of the fork.Once we finished that we boiled them in a pot until they floated to the top. When we took them out, I put them in a bowl and I poured some olive oil and and salt on them. they tasted exquisite, I couldn't Imagine them tasting any better with tomato sauce then they already did.
Then we made the sauce for them, we fried up unions with garlic, then added tomato paste and canned tomato chunks as well. After cooking the sauce for a bit we blended it, Then we put it back on the stove to heat it up again. when it was done we put it on the Gnocchi's and tried them. Surprisingly it wasn't as good as I suspected it would be, but it was still good.
I would defiantly make the gnocchi again but not the sauce.

This is not a picture of me making them.

Vibrio Vulnificus

Vibrio Vulnificus
This bacteria thrives in salt water.
The food sources involved with the contaminants are oysters, clams, lobsters , fish, most sea food.
The implicated illness with this bacteria is acute diarrhea, and wound infection.
The incubation period for this bacteria is between one and seven days.
Symptoms of this bacteria include Gastrointestinal illness, Fever, and Shock.
Eventually after getting the bacteria the host will either be cured from the bacteria or will die of the infection.
Ways to prevent from getting this bacteria is avoiding oysters, and avoiding getting cut in warm coastal waters.
When the oysters are harvested and and cleaned, any bacteria that survived processing will be shipped to stores, and people will buy and eat the oysters, and they will get infected.

bible search 3

Bible search 3

     1)  A) God said his name is I am.

b) God does not want people to swear falsely in his name.

c) God has mercy on us and will forgive us.

d) God is so excellent that he set his glory above the heavens.

e) The lord is our help.

f) God is the only way of salvation.

g) Jesus was humble and god exalted him.

h) The people who have gods name written on there forehead will be saved.

     2)

a) There is none else but God.

b) Anyone who worships idols is an abomination.

c) Before god there was no god. He was God before there were any idols.

d) God is saying that there is no other god but him, and he still takes care of the people who worship other gods.

    3)

a) If other beliefs are contradicting the bible them we know that there is no proof in it.

b) Not all prophecies are false; we should consider which ones were true.

c) The word of God helps you discern thoughts and intents of the hearts.

d) Don’t believe every spirit because there many false profits in the world.

biscotti

This week in foods we made biscotti. Biscotti is a dry bread stick that you can dip in your coffee.
we made it twice this week using two different recipes.
For the first recipe, we started with mixing the oil, eggs, and sugar together. Then we added  the flour and  baking powder. we mixed until it was a think dough. Then we flattened it to about a 1/2 inch think and put it in the oven for 20 minutes. when it got out we sliced them, flipped them on their side, and put them back in for another 10 minutes. when they got out of the oven they tasted really good.
for the second recipe we did the same thing but with butter instead of olive oil, and we added vanilla.
overall I liked the second recipe more then the first one, it had more flavor.
I would defiantly make the second one again just because they are so easy to make and take so little time.

lentils

This week we made lentils and rice, and lentil soup.
 For the lentil soup, we fried up leeks with unions in butter, then we added water and lentils. we boiled the lentils with thyme and bay leaves until they were soft, then we blended them in a blender. After blending we put the soup back on the stove to heat it up again. It didn't taste very good so we added garlic and chili  powder.
On Thursday we made rice and lentils.
We started frying unions and garlic in a pan, then we added curry powder and water. we put the lentils in the water and let them simmer until the water started to get think and the lentils started to break down. Then we added rice and put a lid on it until the rice finished cooking.
When it was done the lentils had all dissolved into the water and it was just the rice left.
The second lentil dish tasted a lot better then the first one did.
I would defiantly make the second soup again but not the first one.

Food Comparison

Food Comparison
On Tuesday we made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. On Wednesday however, we made gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches and gourmet tomato soup.
For the first grilled cheese sandwiches we made, all we did is butter one side of each slice of bread, put a slice of cheese in it, and fry it up in a pan. For the tomato soup, we opened the can of soup, put the contents in a pot, added milk, and heated it up.  A child could probably do it because it was just that simple.
For the gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches  we chopped up peppers and basil, and used tomato slices with real cheese.
For the gourmet soup, we used caned tomatoes, bay leaves, onions, and garlic.
The gourmet sandwich tasted a lot better because it had some vegetables it and better quality cheese. Surprisingly, the gourmet soup didn't taste as good as the canned soup (at least to me). Overall, both grilled cheese sandwiches tasted good, but the second one tasted better.

forensic specialist

The forensic specialist I am interested in is the forensic chemist. Forensic chemistry is very interesting to me because the chemists can find small details and do precise tests on them.(eg, small blood splatters, ink samples, DNA samples etc) I think that forensic chemistry is the most important type of forensic, although the others are important too. If it wasn't for the chemists there would be no one to do the drug tests, blood analysis and DNA tests. there have been people who were serving time in jail for many years until they came out with a way to test DNA. Many people have been proven innocent as a result of these tests.

Here is a video showing some of what forensic chemists do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1lrid2nobMd2nobM

Show and tell

Watch "Science of Murder: Blood Spatter" on YouTube

Watch "Ohio University Forensic Chemistry Lab, Color Tests" on YouTube

Watch "NATURE | Crime Scene Creatures | Fly Justice | PBS" on YouTube