Channeling the Shorehouse...

Last week during her lead-up to a crafty holiday, Laura at the Shorehouse showed off a very cool recipe in a jar!

Tonight we took a page from Miss Laura's book and made our own!

As part of being a new member of the Junior League, I've spent the past month with a group of five other ladies doing research to create a "signature project" for our provisional class. Tomorrow night we're giving a presentation about our program to the larger group and we're all going to get to vote on which project we're actually going to pursue.

If ours gets picked, I'll fill you all in... but in the mean time, here's a taste of what we've been up to...

This is a laminated cookbook that we've put together. Our project would involve a 5 week nutrition/
math/
science curriculum for children participating in an afterschool program in one of the local school systems. This is a picture of a sample cookbook that we put together. Another component of our project would be publishing a regular Junior League Cookbook (to be sold at local bookstores and on our website), the proceeds from which would go to benefit the community partner who runs the afterschool program we'd be working with.

Then, by way of bribing our constituency, we put together Recipes in a Jar for Cinnamon-Oatmeal Pancakes. I've never had so many oats in my kitchen before! Earlier today one of our research group members dropped off 36 mason jars, 10 pounds of oats, 10 pounds of whole wheat flour, 25 pounds of regular flour and assorted other ingredients.
Tonight, two of the other research ladies and I (and Miss B.) mixed together the ingredients and filled thirty jars! Thanks to some snazzy squares cut from fat quarters from Jo-Ann, and some ribbon and Voila!

We figured we would give these away to the rest of the Junior Leaguers as "handouts" with our presentation tomorrow night... it goes to show the type of healthy simple eating that we would focus on in our after-school cooking/nutrition program. And putting these jars together did demonstrate just how you can bring math education into the kitchen. All three of us were a little burnt out from the day so we really couldn't speak to one another while we were measuring (it proved to take too much higher brain activity to keep all of the measurement calculations straight, and let's not even discuss halving the original recipe!) ;)