My Pudding Predicament

A couple weeks ago, I made instant pudding for the first time. For the first time! Yes, somehow I managed to live 25 years without once making pudding. Instant pudding, nonetheless! Anyway, I made the pudding (it is SO easy) and it was delicious! And that is how I discovered that I really like pudding.

So I decided to experiment. The first pudding that I made was Oreo pudding. We had it as dessert for a meal with some friends. Next, I decided to try out pistachio pudding. It was good, but I thought the little bits of nut in it were kind of out of place. Austin wouldn't even taste it, though, because it was green (evidently it looked really weird, heh. :).

To make up for the weird pistachio pudding, I made chocolate pudding, since anything chocolate is Austin's favorite. I thought it was good and very chocolate-y, but I tend to like variety in my chocolate (for example, plain chocolate ice cream is ok, but put some cookie bits in, or caramel, or bits of wafer, or maybe some nuts, and I just yum that up!). I decided to try it with fresh strawberries. It was a success! I ended up eating most of the pudding because I liked it so much. Austin was very disappointed when he came home from school and no pudding was left.

Well, I thought if I made vanilla pudding, Austin wouldn't be so disappointed if I ate all of it. I found out really quickly that I do not like plain vanilla pudding. It's so ... boring! and it's way too sweet all by itself. So I tried it with strawberries, but it just made the strawberries seem tasteless. Then I had the bright idea to squeeze some lime juice in the next batch of vanilla pudding I made and see if that improved it (I did the same with some vanilla ice cream and it was DIVINE!).

I thought that I should probably mix up the pudding first so the juice wouldn't interfere with the thickening process. After the pudding was soft-set, I squeezed that juice in and boy, was it good! I was delighted! I had fixed vanilla pudding!

Now here's my predicament: I wanted that pudding to be just a little bit thicker, so I put it in the fridge. An hour or so later, I decided to try it. I did, and found to my dismay that the pudding was no thicker than when I put it in the fridge! And it even seemed a little bit thinner, but I hoped that was just my mind playing tricks on me. Well, I put it back in the fridge to see if it would be better after sitting in the fridge a little bit longer. WRONG! The next day, I tried it again, and that pudding was not pudding. It was sweetened milk. That pudding had the same consistency as milk! I was very disappointed.

My initial theory as to why this happened is this: The lime juice was very acidic, and it denatured the protein in the milk, causing the thickening reaction to reverse. I did some research to try to verify this hypothesis, and I couldn't find anything specific to back up my hypothesis (or to disprove it), but it is true that the proteins in milk can be denatured by exposing them to something acidic. I saw several things as to why pudding thickened, and at least one thing said something about the ingredients of the pudding interacting with the protein. However! Usually when protein is denatured, it thickens; for example, when an egg is cooked, the protein (the white) gets harder and thicker.

I decided to do a new search for acid and instant pudding, and I found out that the key thickening agent in pudding mix is tetrasodium pyrophosphate, which is an acidity regulator! I found my answer! The pH has to be very specific to allow the pudding to thicken. There were several other things that I found in my search that said that it was the starch in the pudding mix that thickened the milk to pudding (like flour helping gravy to thicken?) and also something about how if the starch is broken down then the pudding won't thicken. Acid will react with so many things that I wouldn't be surprised if it broke down the starch and made it impossible to thicken.

If anyone else has any other ideas as to why this happened, or how I can have my delicious lime pudding without making it thin instead of thick, I'd love to hear!

Family History and Louisa May Alcott

 I feel like my ability to do high-quality family history work has improved drastically over the last week or so. Let me explain:

<<<Disclaimer! This may be uninteresting to people who have no interest in doing family history work now or in the future>>>

1.
I am currently reading a biography of Louisa May Alcott, the author of the well-known novel Little Women.  Through this biography, I have learned much of the culture and logistics of life during the 1800's. Alcott grew up in poverty (worse poverty than her characters in the book; throughout her childhood, Alcott was hungry much of the time), but she had well-off relatives.

Many of Alcott's relatives shared names. There were several Sams, Abbys, and Louisas. On her mother's side, Alcott's grandparents recycled the names of the babies that died soon after birth, giving those names to subsequent children (evidently this was a very common practice during this time period - which makes family history tricky!). There were 12 live births, but only 8 lived past infancy. All of the children that had died shared names with siblings that were born later.

The biography included specific information about Alcott's family that helped me better understand the time period; I believe that that understanding, in turn, will help me to learn about my ancestors. Other than for the wealthy, life was pretty much miserable. Most people did not have enough to eat and housing was hard to obtain. The Alcott family moved scores of times, only owning two of the houses that they lived in, and those by going into debt that that could not repay until after Louisa Alcott had made her fortune through writing.

For anyone that would like to learn more about a specific time period or place, I recommend reading a biography of a person that you're interested in who lived during the time or place that you're interested in to get a better understanding of the setting that certain documents and records were made.

2.
Austin and I set a goal to index a certain number of names by the end of March using FamilySearch Indexing. For those of you who are not familiar with what this is, it basically provides opportunities for volunteers to transcribe information from scanned images to digital information. The information that is transcribed (usually names, birth dates, and other information such as family relationships) is searchable after the volunteer completes the transcription. The image that the data was transcribed from is linked to the information as well, so anyone looking at the information can also look at the original document.

As I've indexed, I've been able to index several different kinds of records. I've noticed that many times, there is additional information on the original document that is not indexed. I'm actually looking forward to looking at these documents for my own ancestors now! I've wanted to search out my ancestors for a long time now, but didn't feel that I had the know-hod to do so.

I've also noticed that families settled in the same general area, and several people of different ages but the same name may live in about the same place. That's another tricky thing to keep in mind while resolving duplicates and finding out more about a particular ancestor.

When I started doing indexing, I did not know that it would improve my ability and confidence in finding and searching out my ancestors. I just thought that I was making more records available to those who are already searching for their ancestors. I'm so glad that I was willing to do it, though, because of how much I've learned through it. This also comes highly recommended! If you want to be more confident in doing family history, then you should index, and index multiple kinds of records.

Why blog? or, Why should Katie blog?

Hello everyone, and welcome to my Blog! Haha, blog sounds much less poetic than humble abode. Like slog! Hello everyone, and welcome to my Slog. Just kidding. This blog will be high-quality and not sloggish in the least. But, as you've already seen, this blog is prone to puns.

So! A little background on why I decided to blog:

1. Peer pressure. OK, not really, but several of my friends have blogs, and it's really great to be able to read their thoughts in detail instead of just little blurbs on Facebook. So this blog is for my friends who'd like a little more detail on my life, thoughts, and aspirations.

2. One of my sisters is going to start a blog, and told the family about it and why she's doing it. I thought she had good reasons.

3. I actually don't have a third reason but you need to have at least three reasons to have a good reason to do something, right?

Now for the reason for the title of my blog!

1. I love playing Boggle, and am known among family and some friends as the Boggle champion (ps, if anyone wants to challenge me, I'd love to play! Just let me know when and where)

2. Boggle and blog are doubly alliterative and are fun to say together.

3. Boggle blogger was already taken, so Boggledy blog was the next best thing!


Well, that's it for my reasons! I hope you enjoy my blog. I will post musings, interesting happenings, and whatever else may strike my fancy for sharing with the world at large (and family and friends in particular).