From Soup to Nuts

Posted on May 11, 2013 by laura

Soup is good for you, but it should also be fun to eat. That’s why alphabet soup, soup with little o’s, etc. are all great options. Even better is when your soup is looking back at you. Maybe you’ve tried those Campbell’s soups with noodles shaped like princesses, Phineas and Ferb, or Scooby Doo. Did you ever wonder exactly how many of each character end up in the can? Or whether it’s equal? Did some character not get his fair share of noodles? And what are your chances of getting your favorite character with each bite? It’s time to run some numbers.

Wee ones: If you eat 3 Cinderella noodles, 2 Snow Whites and 2 Ariels, how many princess soup noodles did you eat?

Little kids: If your Cars soup has 22 Maters but twice as many Lightning McQueens, how many Lightnings are in there? Bonus: How many Maters and Lightnings all together?

Big kids: These soups each seem to have 6 types of noodles. If Campbell’s makes 6 different soups in this series, how many different kinds of noodles do they have to make? Bonus: If you’re eating soup from just one can, and with each spoonful you pick up either 1 or 2 noodles, how many total different spoonful combos can you scoop?

Answers:
Wee ones: 7 noodles.

Little kids: 44 Lightning noodles. Bonus: 66 noodles altogether.

Big kids: 36 different noodles. Bonus: You have 27 types of spoon arrangements: 6 1-noodle possibilities and 21 2-noodle possibilities.

National Inventors Month

Posted on May 8, 2013 by laura

May is National Inventors Month, when we celebrate all the gadgets and materials that make our lives better. Whether it’s the refrigerator, your light-up sneakers, or that one cool Lego piece that everyone fights over, our homes, backpacks and pockets are full of objects that at one time didn’t exist but now make our lives better (most of the time). What’s funny is a lot of inventions have been created totally by accident, including the microwave, potato chips, and our favorite dessert around here, the warm-center chocolate cake. If you get out there and make stuff, chances are you’ll eventually solve a key problem – maybe one you hadn’t even thought of.

Wee ones: Silly Putty was invented by a guy trying to make rubber, except the type he created was too bouncy. If a normal rubber ball bounced 3 feet but his new stuff bounced twice as high, how high did the Silly Putty stuff bounce?

Little kids: Warm-center chocolate cake – the kind that gushes yummy chocolate sauce when you cut it with your fork – was born when chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten undercooked a cake. If you need 8 tablespoons of chopped chocolate to make 4 cakes, how many teaspoons of chocolate is that? (There are 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon.) Bonus: If you need half as much sugar, how many teaspoons of sugar do you need?

Big kids: Fireworks were supposedly invented 2000 years ago when a cook mixed charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, which, when packed in a tube and set on fire, exploded. If you mix 3 tablespoons of charcoal, twice as much sulfur, and twice as much saltpeter as sulfur, how many tablespoons of stuff do you pack in the tube? (Note: This isn’t the real recipe, but please do not try it!) Bonus: If each tablespoon of mixture turns into 12 sparkles in the sky, how many sparkles does your fireworks tube make?

Answers:
Wee ones: 6 feet high.

Little kids: 24 teaspoons. Bonus: 12 teaspoons. And see below for the original recipe…super-easy to make, and a total crowd-pleaser.

Big kids: 21 tablespoons: 3 charcoal, 6 sulfur, and 12 saltpeter. Bonus: 252 sparkles.

Recipe for Warm Soft Chocolate Cake
(from Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, via Martha Stewart’s website)

8 T (1 stick) butter + more
2 t flour + more
4 oz bittersweet chocolate
2 large whole eggs
2 large egg yolks
1/4 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Butter and lightly flour four 4-oz molds. Tap out excess flour and set aside.
Put butter and chocolate in double boiler (or microwave on Low) and heat till chocolate is almost completely melted. Stir till blended.
Beat together eggs, yolks, and sugar until light and thick. Add the chocolate mixture and beat to combine. Quickly beat in flour until just combined.
Divide batter evenly among the molds.
Place filled molds on a baking sheet in the oven and bake until the sides have set but the centers remain soft – about 6-7 minutes for foil ramekins, 7 for ceramic ones.
Invert each mold onto a plate, and let rest 10 sec. Unmold by lifting up one corner of the mold; the cake will fall out onto the plate. Or, if serving from ceramic, leave cake in ramekin and let rest 10-15 minutes before serving.
Serve with vanilla or coffee ice cream.

All Birthdays Count

Posted on May 5, 2013 by laura

Today is our guinea pig Hershey’s first birthday! Well, okay, we don’t know if it’s exactly today, but it’s the official date, since she was 5 months old when we got her last October 5. As we look at how big she’s gotten, and how much smarter she is, it reminds us that any kind of pet takes a lot of tender loving care. Pets are basically warm, furry, living vacuum cleaners: they just eat. Yes, they do sleep and poop and show us some love, but their main job in life is to eat. And when you add up a whole year of eating for a pet — either yours or someone else’s — the numbers can surprise you.

Wee ones: If Hershey eats 2 meals of hay each day and 2 snacks of whatever veggies are left over from lunch and dinner, how many times does she eat each day?

Little kids: If Hershey is 1 year old and she showed up here when she was 5 months old, how long has she been living here? Bonus: If she and her fellow Bedtime Math guinea pig, Snickers (shown here), take 3 months to eat through a medium bag of timothy hay, how many bags of hay have we had to open since the guinea pigs showed up?

Big kids: Hershey eats about 2 tablespoons of dry food every day, too. Given that there are 16 tablespoons in a cup, what fraction of a cup does she eat in 1 week? Bonus: Rounding that down to 3/4 of a cup, how many cups does she eat in a 52-week year?

The sky’s the limit: Hershey weighed just 10 ounces when we got her; she now weighs 2 pounds 2 ounces. If your pet dog (or a friend’s dog) weighed 12 pounds as a puppy last year and now weighs 40 pounds, which furry pet grew a bigger fraction of his/her starting weight? (Reminder: There are 16 ounces in a pound.)

Answers:
Wee ones: 4 times a day.

Little kids: 7 months. Bonus: 3 bags, since they finished 2 bags in 6 months.

Big kids: 14/16, or 7/8 of a cup. Bonus: 39 cups, which is over 2 gallons.

The sky’s the limit: Hershey grew by more. She now weighs 34 ounces, which is 3 2/5 times her weight a year ago, while the puppy weighs 3 1/3 times his starting weight. 2/5 is more than 1/3…to check that, you can convert each one to 15ths, which gives you 6/15 vs. 5/15. So Hershey grew a bigger fraction.

Boogie Like a Bee

Posted on May 1, 2013 by laura

They say April showers bring May flowers, and where there are flowers there are bees. Bees collect pollen from those blooming flowers to make honey. But how do they tell each other where to find faraway fresh flowers? Well, they can’t talk, so they dance. When a bee finds a field of flowers, she rushes back to the hive and gives directions to the other bees by doing the “waggle dance.” The bee runs around in a figure 8, and the angle of that 8 shows the other bees where the flowers are. Straight up and down the side of the hive means the flowers are in the direction of the sun; if the bee tilts 15 degrees to the left, that tells the other bees to fly out of the hive 15 degrees to the left of the sun. The length of time of the dance shows how far to fly, too. Works just as well as GPS — though it’s hard to imagine dancing to tell someone where the grocery store is.

Wee ones: If a bee goes out to find flowers and collects pollen from 4 roses, 3 tulips and a daisy, how many total flowers did she visit?

Little kids: Bees work way hard to make honey: to make 1 pound of honey, bees have to collect pollen from over 2 million flowers! How many flowers do they need to visit to make 6 pounds of honey? Bonus: A bee visits between 50 and 100 flowers every time it leaves the hive. If one bee always visits 50 flowers per trip, after 2 trips how many flowers has she visited?

Big kids: That bee’s day isn’t done yet. Over the course of a full day, a bee visits about 2,000 flowers. If that one bee visits 50 flowers on every trip, how many trips does she need to make to visit 2,000 flowers? Bonus: How many bees would have to work together to make the 1 pound of honey in that one day? (Reminder: that pound requires 2 million flowers.)

Answers:
Wee ones: 8 flowers.

Little kids: 12 million flowers. Bonus: 100 flowers.

Big kids: 40 trips. Bonus: 1,000 bees.

Pick a Pack of Prickly Pear

Posted on April 24, 2013 by laura

If you’ve ever tried to touch a cactus, it probably wasn’t so easy, given all those spiky prickles. Those prickles are actually the cactus’ leaves, and they’re skinny so they have less area to dry out in the sun, because cacti live in very hot places. But despite the spikes, you can eat some kinds of cactus, like the prickly pear plant shown here. The little flowers sprouting from the edges of some of those paddles will turn into fruit, called a prickly pear fig. You can eat that fruit, and you can also eat the paddles themselves. But the paddles and the figs are covered with really teeny prickles, too, so you have to peel them carefully…beware when taking a bite out of cactus, or it might take a bite out of you.

Wee ones: If one prickly pear paddle has 6 flowers and half of them turn into fruit, how many prickly pears will you get?

Little kids: If a prickly pear paddle has flowers numbered 1 through 9, and birds eat the multiples of 2 and then you pick all the multiples of 3, which flowers are left to turn into fruit? Bonus: If in picking each of those fruits you get 4 prickles stuck in you, how many prickles do you have to pluck out of you afterwards?

Big kids: That cactus has a lot of paddles and prickles, all growing from thick, woody, dried-out branches growing out of the center trunk. If the 4 branches each have 6 sets of 5 paddles, how many funny flat paddles are there? Bonus: If each paddle has 20 prickles on each of its 2 sides, how many prickles does this plant have in total?

The sky’s the limit: Suppose every prickly pear paddle has either 16 or 25 prickles on its sunny side, and 15, 24 or 36 prickles on its shady side – and that the number of fruits growing on a paddle is the biggest number that divides into both prickle numbers (called the largest common factor). What is the prickle count and fruit count of the paddle type with the most fruit?

Answers:
Wee ones: 3 prickly pear fruits.

Little kids: Only flowers 1, 5 and 7 are left. Bonus: 12 prickles, from the 3 fruits.

Big kids: 120 paddles. Bonus: 4,800 prickles!

The sky’s the limit: If you combine 16 with the 3 shady-side numbers, its biggest common factor is with 24 – they’re both divisible by 8. If you combine 25 with each of those numbers, its biggest common factor is with 15, and it’s just 5. So the best combo is 16 with 24, giving you 8 fruits and 40 prickles.