Classes Now

Since we have 10 school days of our math and science classes, we have a quiz every couple of days, a midterm tomorrow, and then a final on Tuesday. In math, we've learned about converting measurements, working with yield percents/edible portion quantity/as purchased quantity, and costing a portion of food.

We have a very useful yield percent chart for common fruits and vegetables, so you can see that you can roughly count on 68% of your whole bananas that you buy being edible, about 50% of your whole melons being edible, and 97% of yourberries being edible (there are usually a some damaged ones). This came in handy the other night when a recipe called for a 2 lb butternut squash to be peeled and cubed. Since butternut squash has a 52% yield, I knew that a one pound bag of Trader Joe's brilliant pre-cubed butternut squash would be equivalent.

So, this is the stuff I'm studying for the midterm tomorrow.

In Science class, today was dairy day, yesterday was fats day, before that was flour. Today, the chef demonstrated making all kinds of dairy concoctions from butter to ricotta to yogurt to mascarpone to creme fraiche, mostly by using combinations of milk, cream, vinegar, or lemon juice. They all need a day to set, so we'll see how they set up tomorrow.