I’m a prairie kid who loves research. I have a Master’s in economics with a focus on public programs, labour and education. Long before that, I did my undergrad in physics & English with a math minor.

Besides my resume, you’ll find this page full of sewing projects, the odd published poem, and stories about Canadian science.

A note about the blog title: in math and physics, the prefix eigen means one's own. It comes from the german, but mostly I always liked thinking about a particle's eigenvalues, and thought I might apply the same thought to my excursions.

Molecular Gastronomy

Molecular Gastronomy

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SO! As an introduction to molecular gastronomy at Saturday Science, we did both caviar and spaghetti, made out of JUICE.

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Fruit punch caviar at saturday #science

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We based the recipe on this sort of genius "non-molecular gastronomy" recipe by SprinkeBakes, which still has a lot of science.

  • Oil and water doesn't mix! Compare what happens when you add the juice mix to water and to oil.
  • Because of that, droplets of water in the oil pull themselves into balls....
  • And the extreme temperature semi-instantly sets the jelly!
  • Plus, Agar agar is SEAWEED and noone knew that that seaweed could make jelly. Predictions (seaweed is slimy, and jelly is slimy, so...) abound.

For classroom versions of this recipe, where I didn't have access to a stovetop, and things had to be at safe temperatures for very little ones and hands-on to infinity for the oldest kids, I boiled juice in the kettle WITH the agar. We tried adding agar to the boiled juice, but that didn't work at all.

To make spaghetti, I poured some of the juice mixture into squeeze tubes from Dollarama and let them cool to touchable temperatures before we used them. We'd carefully squeeze the juice into a straw, drop it in an ice bath, then squeeze out the spaghetti a minute later. Worked pretty alright, especially for the 7-10 kids.

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Orange (flavoured) spaghetti, brought to you by Saturday #science.

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Catapults!

Catapults!

Why won’t the Canada Science Museum explain why it’s closed?

Why won’t the Canada Science Museum explain why it’s closed?