Making butter and biscuits like Laura and Mary

To start out we are reading Little House in the Big Woods for social studies and I'm "winging it" for things to go with the reading.  We have looked up Pepin, Wisconsin on the map and discussed many aspects of the Ingalls'  life. 

Yesterday we did two projects.  First we made butter like ma did.  The kids shredded carrot and we cooked it in some cream to color the butter.  Ma liked all things on her table to be pretty and she liked her butter to be yellow.

                                 The carrot cooking in the cream really did change it's color.
The kids shook and shook the cream in a small canning jar so we could observe the change.  Mommy shook and shook a lot too.

                                                           JR shaking the cream.
We got some beautiful yellow butter. (The kids ate the carrot that had been cooked in the cream which Laura and Mary had considered a treat.)  We decided to make some butter without cooking the carrot in it to see how different it was.  I decided to skip the warming step.  I should have known better.  We got whipped cream instead.  We decided to eat it on strawberries for lunch.  Pioneers might have had such a treat. 

                                              JJ enjoying her strawberries and cream.
One more try and we got white butter.  There really was a big difference in color.  Would they taste different?  There was a slight difference in taste just trying the butter outright.  We decided to have a taste test at supper time.

                                                        Our yellow and white butters.

For supper the boys made biscuits from scratch.  It tied in with social studies and reading and math.  They read the recipe and measured mostly by themselves and the control freak in me did step back and let them do it but it was difficult and messy.  They made beautiful buttermilk biscuits and we discussed some math concepts and baking concepts along the way also talking about the ingredients we used and that pioneers would have used.

                                                              JD cutting biscuits.
We ate our biscuits one half with white butter and one half with yellow.  On the biscuit it was hard to tell any difference in taste at all.  I was going to post a picture of one of the kids enjoying their biscuits but they ate them up before I had a chance to take one.

Today we read the chapter about Christmas and make vinegar pie.  Later this week JD will be following a pioneer recipe for Johnny Cakes.  We are learning about and eating like pioneers. (You know I am always about the food.)