Mitul Patel here. 8P. Blog Publicity Representative.
This week it's my turn to write the blog! I hope you have read the blog from last week. We have had some hits already. No time now to enter the Chip Quiz. A couple of Year 7's entered, but so did I and I got full marks - no cheating I promise! So I claim the chocolate bar - those year 7's who submitted answers can still go to Mrs P for a mini mars bar as a consolation prize.
The quiz this week is totally different - a bit tricky but I bet your parents will know some of the answers - especially if they like cakes, puddings and desserts! You'll find the quiz at the bottom of the page.
Last term, in English Support lessons, some of us researched the potato.
We called the projest 'The Humble Potato' because humble is an adjective - a describing word - and here we are describing the good old spud. Synonyms for 'humble' include - modest, not - boastful, reserved.
The spud doesn't show off - it just gets on with its job Yet, it's really versatile. You can use it in lots of different recipes. Mrs P has even got a recipe from Cadbury's where you use istant mashed potato in a chocolate cake - it is a starch after all and you just use it instead of flour! We'll publish the recipe next week for you to try
Potatoes have a lot of history behind them, they are full of nutrients, are easy to grow, and so much more.
Here are a few things I found out...
The
Humble Potato
1. The word for potato in French is
pomme de terre and the reason why it’s
called that is because pomme means apple ,and de terre means from the ground .The
meaning of pomme de terre literally means apple from the ground.
2. In the Indian culture we use
potatoes in potato pukaras’s
3. Fun Facts
about potatoes
· Brits
are the third largest consumers of potatoes in Europe. Only the Portuguese and the Irish eat more
than us.
· Fredrick
Lord Woolton, once a Minister of Food, may be remembered as the most popular
government minister ever. During the Second World War he declared that fish
& chips were the only food not to be rationed.
4.
2 Interesting Facts about the chip shop
A quarter of all potatoes grown in Britain are
made into chips – that’s around 1.5million tonnes each year, or nearly the same
weight as 125,000 full double decker buses .
The
World’s largest fish and chip portion was made in July 2011 at the Wensleydale
Heifer Fayre.
I
asked my Dad a fact about a potato, and
he told me that the potato skin has lots of vitamins, so we should always eat
the skin too.
5. Remember
one thing about Spuds in Space
Did you know that in 1995, potatoes were
taken into space aboard the shuttle Columbia.This is the first time that food
had ever been grown in space. The experiment was to see if potatoes would grow in micro gravity like on spacecrafts. If we are to send astronauts on longer space journeys in the future they will need to grow some of their own food. The spuds did grow, the roots grew in all directions as there was no gravity, and they grew longer and faster than the 'control' ones growing normally in a lab at the Kennedy Space Lab on earth.
There is a picture of the potato tubers growing on Columbia in 1999 below:
Mrs P googled 'spuds in space' and there were lots of other interesting web links.
A school in Idaho, some years later, were allowed to send potatoes up on the space shuttle to see if they would be able to grow on Mars They use soil that contained the same sort of stuff as would be found on the surface of Mars. The spuds did grow!
Another website showed a potato dressed as Santa that was launched into 'space' by some school children in Devon, who attached the mini Santa Shuttle to a helium weather balloon. It was up for over 2 hours at 90,000 metres, before the balloon exploded, letting the santa shuttle float back to earth attached to a parachute! It landed, appropriately in a field of Xmas trees, being grown ready for the festive season!
You can see a picture of SPUDNIK below. Read more about these things on the web for yourselves.
Now here's this week's quiz.......
The answers are Cakes, Puddings or desserts. eg. A mere thing .answer..TRIFLE
Have a go - even if you can't answer all of them you still might win! The prize is a Christmas selection box!
1. Door locker, citrus fruit tart.
2. Cooked US State
3. American River with a silt base tart.
4 This festive roll is not for the fire
5 Dark Wooded area celebration cake.
6. Cocoa confectionary with trainee girl guide.
7. What you do to start a race.
8. Sweet Ballerina.
9. One for the 25th December.
10. Mr Clinton's daughter with a type of hair arrangement.
11. Granny Smith's shoe repairer.
12. Public School shambles
13. Espied Richard
14 Half a pair of long legged bloomers - with praise!
15. French eat white dessert.
