Seriously Happening Shrimp and Green Beans!

 

Flavor drenched Shrimp and Green Beans, photo credit Kalyn's Kitchen (blog)

Kalyn’s Kitchen: Recipe for Spicy Roasted Green Beans (or Broccoli) and Shrimp

Has this ever happened to you? You see a recipe that looks really good, and you make it,and it IS really good! So, you put it in the keeper file, but you never get around to making it again. Maybe the ingredient list is too long, or the steps are complicated, or for whatever reason it is not compelling enough to pull it out and make it again on a busy night, or at the end of the week when you would go out for dinner if you weren’t on South Beach.

Like many people, the adults at the Garner House are looking to drop some unwanted pounds.  The tried and true South Beach right carb approach to weight loss works for us, but we tend to get into a rut with it.  We have been on the hunt for some new, and frankly, easy recipes.  I subscribe to Kalyn’s Kitchen because she posts a wide variety of South Beach friendly recipes.  This recipe caught my eye because we love shrimp, and we love green beans!  To my dismay, the first time we planned to make it, the store had really ugly green beans.  So, I bought frozen green beans.  I know.  I strongly dislike frozen green beans too, and they really cannot compare, but my children will eat them.  Kalyn herself in a response to a comment does not recommend them.  So the fact that I (the frozen green bean hater) really liked the recipe with frozen green beans is in itself a testimonial to the absolute deliciousness of this recipe…

Last night, tired, hungry, but well supplied with fresh green beans, Ralph made Kalyn’s Recipe for Spicy Roasted Green Beans and Shrimp again.  WOW! The crunchy green beans, drenched in healthy flavor, are an absolute delight for your mouth!  The shrimp equally tasty, and truly satisfying.  The recipe is also quite easy to put together!  This is one recipe where there are no leftovers, and double helpings of green beans are seriously happening!

How water temperature affects deep ocean currents…

Our Swimming Creatures of the Sixth Day curriculum kicks off with information about the ocean itself, and one of the neat activities demonstrates how water temperature affects water movement.  Thermohaline currents are deep ocean currents, caused by temperature, or salt content or both.  In this experiment we were only working with water temperature.

Our question:  Which is heavier - hot or cold water? Grace decided that hot water was heavier.

The procedure is as follows:  First put a few drops of blue food coloring in a clear container of hot water.  Then put a few drops of yellow, in a cup of ice water.  Pierce the cup, and observe the yellow ice water, as it escapes into the blue hot water. 

Then we did the experiment in reverse:  This time put the blue food coloring in a clear container of ice water.  Then put a few drops of yellow in a cup of hot water.  Pierce the cup, and observe the warm yellow water, as it escapes into the cold blue water.

We observed that the yellow cold water leaked toward the bottom, and then mixed.  We also observed that the blue food coloring blended really quickly in the hot water.  We then observed that the hot yellow water when it leaked moved upward.  Grace decided after watching this that “Really, I have to say that cold water is heavier than hot water. ”  

Here are a few photos, followed by our conclusion!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

She didn’t like the idea that her hypothesis was proven wrong, but I explained to her that this is actually how science is supposed to work!  If you ignore your results, or try to skew the results to prove your hypothesis, you might be considered a global warming expert!

New Zoo – fun photo from NASA

After a WONDERFUL Christmas break, Grace and I headed back up to the school room last Monday! We started a few new things - one of which is the second book in the Zoology series which focuses on sea creatures.  The first chapter discusses salinity, tides, the continental shelf and abyssal plain and also phytoplankton and zooplankton.  I was so excited to receive this timely photo from NASA of a plankton bloom – it’s quite lovely!  The NASA description is below the image.

Stirring Up a Bloom Off Patagonia

Off the coast of Argentina, two strong ocean currents recently stirred up a colorful brew of floating nutrients and microscopic plant life just in time for the Southern Hemisphere’s summer solstice. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of a massive phytoplankton bloom off of the Atlantic coast of Patagonia on Dec. 21, 2010. Scientists used seven separate spectral bands to highlight the differences in the plankton communities across this swath of ocean.

Image Credit: NASA