Her-Story: HeLa

Expert:  • Read two biographies about influential women; one featuring someone from the 1900s and the other from the 1800s. • Share five things (from each book) that you learned on The Farmgirl Connection.

Henrietta Lacks (aka HeLa) 1920-1951/Forever.  From The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

1951 - Henrietta's cervical cancer tumor was biopsied at Johns Hopkins.  These cancer cells were the first George Gey was able to grow in culture.  However, there was no protocol or precedent for informing or obtaining consent from patients to use their genetic material, raising ethical questions.  Post-HIPA, publishing health information like DNA raises privacy concerns because you might get discriminated against because of genes.  Relatives who share DNA might be singled out for study or discrimination, as was the case for Henrietta's family.  As Henrietta's cells gained notoriety, researchers tried to throw media off by claiming HeLa stood for Helen Lane, but this anonymity came at the cost because her family was not provided with any recognition of the extent of her contribution to science.  

Gey had struggled to propagate healthy cells in culture up to this point because of the Hayflick Limit which stated that cells are preprogrammed to stop replicating after 50 divisions when their telomeres become too short.  However, Henrietta's exposure to viruses like HPV (which is now linked as a cause of cancer) meant her biopsied cancer cell DNA had been overwritten by the virus in a way that removed the limit.  

The ability to grow human cells in culture allowed for a whole new field of medical testing.  These cells could be exposed to radiation, vaccines, taken into space, etc. to observe how they reacted and expedite treatment tests.  One of HeLa's early contributions was in helping Jonas Salk rapidly test a polio vaccine.  

Medical ethics had some catching up to do.  In trying to understand cancer, there was an interval where researchers were putting HeLa cultures into patients without their consent to see if and how these cells would multiply and if different morphologies of the cancer were truly distinct.  

Learning how to culture cells in a lab became a booming industry and paved the way to culture of cells for use in IVF and cloning work.   But HeLa cells were so hardy that they could also throw off some research by contaminating samples in other studies.  Fortunately, HeLa also furthered furthered research in chromosome counting and mapping which eventually allowed Stanley Gartler to identify a rare gene in HeLa (G6PD-A) in cultured cell lines which claimed to be different from HeLa.  

Tragically, it appears Henrietta's oldest daughter, Elsie was also involved in medical testing without consent.  She was institutionalized when the family was no longer able to support her epileptic condition.  The institution which took her was overcrowded, understaffed, and used patients of her profile to test pneumoencephalography, a method of taking crisp x-rays which came with side effects of seizures, vomiting, and crippling headaches lasting for two to three months after the operation.  Elsie ultimately died in their care.  

The two themes that continue to haunt me about this story are: 1.  It is possible to be "influential" as a victim or passive bystander.  Henrietta wasn't consulted about her "donation" to science, but it still had a huge impact.  2.  We should take collective responsibility for human health.  It will facilitate better quality research and we will not have these injustices of Henrietta's descendants scrambling to afford healthcare in spite of her contribution.  

Recycling

Research recycling in your area and what can and cannot be recycled, both at your recycling center and for curbside recycling, if that’s available to you.

We had a good general idea of how to recycle but we visited our residential waste handler's website and still learned a few things:

• Plastic bags and plastic film wrappers cannot be recycled 
• plastic-lined items like to-go coffee cups and juice-boxes cannot be recycled
• Cardboard boxes should be broken down and flattened
• Dirty paper (i.e. the greasy part of a pizza box or to-go containers) cannot be recycled
• Recycled items should be clean, empty and dry to facilitate sorting and to avoid contaminating the paper and cardboard in the single stream.  

We also found a recycling center in walking distance from our home that take and reimburse for California Redemption Value packaging (aluminum cans, plastic, and glass bottles) as well as larger metal items.  My daughter loves visiting here to turn in Dad's aluminum cans because they often give her a handful of candy in addition to paying for the items.  

For e-waste, we keep a look out for the semi-annual times and locations our waste handler offers drive-through e-waste disposal of batteries and electronics.

Determine what you can put into recycling instead of the garbage, and set up a recycling system for yourself. If your area doesn’t support recycling, find other ways to reuse. Do this for a week. 

We are spending the month of January focused on auditing our trash stream.  For more detail, see our updates on this post.    We are also finding ways to reduce the total volume of recycling by buying unpackaged produce at the farmer's market using our own bags and experimenting with from-scratch copy-cat recipes.  For instance, we made a DIY batch of mochi and stuffed it into packaging bound for the recycling/trash.    

Pay it Forward

 

Figure out how much money you spend per person per meal each day of the week.  Pick a day, skip your lunch or dinner meal.  Donate the money saved to your local food bank to help others struggle daily to put food on the table.  

Accounting for spend on food is tricky with our revolving pantry.  One approach I took was to look at several months of weekly grocery bills (before we started to deflect spend into local farmer's markets).  We spent about $205/week on groceries.  With 3 of us and subtracting the meals my husband eats in the office cafeteria, that represents about 50 meals.  So let's say that is about $4.10/meal.  

If we wanted a more generous figure, I looked at Mary Jane's Farm backpacker meals and see that the entrees run about $10-$14.

Next, I needed to skip a meal.  I chose to eat a large-ish breakfast on MLK day (1/19/26) and then skip lunch while my daughter and I helped assemble boxes of shelf-stable foods for people in need.  It was a lot of fun and they kept us so busy I didn't have time to feel hungry.  As an added bonus, the scale said I had kept my lean mass but had dropped 1.2 lbs of something else!  

Now, to donate the saved money to a local food bank.  We are fortunate to have several charitable organizations helping with food distribution in our area.  I had noticed long bread lines at the local middle school on walks and felt like of all the places to support, this one was truly local.  It is organized by Seva Collective.  I figure if I kept on with a one meal skip/week, that should amount to about $25/month and we can afford to round up to $26.41 to cover processing fees.    

Unprocessed Kitchen

 Pick out a guilty pleasure from the grocery store and replicate it organically at home... 

In light of my ongoing month of trash audits, I aspired to make my daughter's standard evening dessert, mochi.  

These run $1.16 - $1.33/serving and generate a lot of cardboard recycling and a plastic film cover.  They aren't organic and I don't love that they have palm oil and wish we had more control over the sugar level, "natural flavors," and things I imagine are stabilizers like guar gum.    

Since I am not the end consumer of this recipe, I compromised a little bit on the "from scratch"  objective to see if I could first entice trying the new concoction.  I used my daughter's favorite healthy-ish organic acai sorbet as the filler, a flavor that is not available in any mochi line.  Yes, it has some stabilizers and a lot of sugar added, but I figured if I got the recipe dialed in that she preferred home-made, I could branch out to banana nice-cream, and other healthier home grown options.  Also, a ball sized dollop of acai is substantially less (and less sugar) than her typical bowl-sized serving.    

We still had a few materials from a gift mochi-making kit (silicon ball mold mat, mold cutter, and baggies of rice/potato starch), so I used these to assemble 8 mochi.  I should have used a larger microwave-safe bowl than my little pyrex round 2 cup dish, the biggest challenge was overflow when I tried to stir it between blasts.  I slid the 6 best-looking ones into an old mochi box.  So far, she has finished one for dessert.  In my own taste test, I concluded that the dough freezes a little more firm with my version and I need to level up a bit on making aesthetically attractive balls, but overall, this was a great start.  

Verdict:  I could easily see myself restocking the dough inputs to whip up some batches of these in the future to "dilute" the store-bought mochi habit.  That said, this is a pretty fussy recipe for the yield and I plan to keep experimenting with other, easier prep dessert/dessert-adjacent dishes.  

Mochi

approx .5 cups ice cream/acai 

.75 cup sweet rice flour

.33 cup sugar

.75 cup water

.25 cup potato starch

Cocoa or matcha powder (optional color)

 Press 10 min thawed ice cream into molds.  Freeze 1-2 hours or overnight

Heatproof bowl sweet rice flour, sugar, optional color whisk then add water 

Cover in plastic wrap, microwave 1 min, stir, 1 min, stir, 30 sec stir

Prep surface with potato starch

Roll out dough on surface, flip, add more starch as needed

Rolling pin to ⅛” thick, cut out 8 circles with dough (my yield was 9)

Plate with plastic wrap (will need to individually wrap balls)

Chill in fridge 30 mins (clean up)

Continue your unprocessed journey and replicate two more items organically. 

#1:  "Snickers" protein bars

This idea got fixed in my head after reading a MaryJane's Farm article about copycat Halloween candy recipes.  I have generally trained myself not to routinely bring candy into the house and couldn't bring myself to make it from scratch, but I do have a guilty pleasure of reaching for a protein bar when things get hectic and they aren't that far off from being a candy bar.  On my favorite protein powder website, I saw a bar recipe I just had to try.  The other things I loved about this recipe is that I could try using Vitamix to make oat into flour and I loved that the authors included the weight of sticky things in grams because I hate to mess up all my measuring cups and would rather spatula messy things directly into the mixture bowl that is sitting on a kitchen scale.  

Again, the perfectionist in me wants to caveat that this isn't perfectly organic and it uses artificial sweeteners (stevia, thaumatin).  Plus when I divide the 25 g of protein powder across 12 servings, each one only has about 1.5 grams of protein from the powder another 8 g from peanuts, PB and oats.  So this is basically a candy bar which happens to have 10 grams of protein.  A comparable snickers looks like it would have about 1/3 that amount of protein.  Snickers also makes a 20 g "hi" protein bar, but there is no way those are easy to find on impulse in a convenience store.  Likewise, it isn't a perfect copycat to the format of bars you can throw into the glove box and forget about for months until you have a food emergency.

Verdict:  Tasty!  The chocolate coating was overly fussy and I can't see myself taking the time if I didn't already have the bain-marie going for a batch of chocolate covered bananas, berries, etc.  That said, I think I will keep experimenting with recipes (like this one) that call for a higher proportion of protein powder to see if I can find a mix that boosts the satiation power of "dessert."   

 Ingredients

For the Base:

100g/3½oz/1 cup oats

70g/2½oz/½ cup roasted peanuts

25g/¼ cup Form Chocolate Peanut Protein

Pinch of salt

60g/2oz/¼ cup smooth peanut butter  (NB:  I substituted slightly chunky chocolate-hazelnut copycat Nutella I was trying to use up) 

2 tbsp maple syrup

1 tbsp coconut oil, melted

1 tbsp plant-based milk

 

For the Middle:

80g/3oz/½ cup medjool dates, pitted weight

60ml/2oz/¼ cup plant-based milk (NB: I substituted cow milk because this didn't need to be vegan)

80g/2¾oz/1/3 cup smooth peanut butter

2 tbsp coconut oil, melted

1 tsp vanilla essence

Pinch of salt

70g/2½oz/½ cup roasted peanuts

 

For the Chocolate Coating:

112g/4oz dark chocolate, chopped or in chips

1 tsp coconut oil (NB: I used cocoa butter chips to thin because this coconut oil was the messiest ingredient (this time of year it is in solid form)).  

Extra peanuts (NB: I skipped this)

Flaky salt

Instructions

1. Line a 15-cm/6-inch square baking pan with baking parchment. Soak the dates for the filling in boiling water for 10 minutes and then drain them.  (NB: I used a pyrex loaf pan which was slightly more surface area)

2. First, make the base: add the oats and peanuts to a small blender and blitz to a fine flour-like texture. Add this into a small mixing bowl with the protein powder, peanut butter, maple syrup, melted coconut oil and plant-based milk. Stir to a sticky mixture that holds together when pressed between two fingers.

3. Pour all of the base mixture into the pan and press down firmly to make a compact layer. Chill in the fridge while you continue.

4. To make the caramel: add the soaked and drained dates, plant-based milk, peanut butter, coconut oil, vanilla essence and salt to the blender and process until really smooth. Stop to scrape down the sides as necessary.

5. Remove the baking pan from the fridge and spread the caramel all over the base. Sprinkle over the peanuts and press down lightly. Return the pan to the fridge (or freezer) for 2 hours, or until firm to touch. (NB: I put in fridge but in the future would favor the freezer to make the dipping step easier)

6. For the chocolate coating: melt together the chocolate and coconut oil in a heat-proof bowl over a pan of simmering water (known as a bain-marie) or in the microwave, until glossy. (NB: I felt I needed slightly more chocolate than this to cover my bars, possibly because I had 12 vs 10)

7. When ready to coat, lift the bars out of the tin and use a sharp, warmed knife to slice the snickers bars into 10 pieces. Now, dip each one into the melted chocolate, face down, to coat the peanut and caramel middle. Allow the excess to drip off and transfer to a plate.

8. While the chocolate is still warm, sprinkle over some crushed peanuts and flaky salt, if desired. Allow to set in the fridge for 10 minutes.

9. Enjoy straight away or keep these bars in a sealed container in the fridge for up to 1 week, or in the freezer for 1 month. Allow them to defrost before eating.

#2:  Pop-can Flaky Biscuits

Like mochi, these bookend my daughter's day as her breakfast of choice.  They are technically organic, but I don't love that each one costs $0.93, they generate 45 grams of packaging trash, and contain palm oil.  My first attempt to DIY was to use a Mary Jane's Farm buttermilk biscuit mix.  These were an improvement in only generating 18 g of trash and not using palm oil.  I also loved that this got me started using my skillet/dutch oven on the stovetop for baking projects.  I had been spooked by the MJF bakeover recipes which called for putting the skillets in an actual oven because my little micorwave/convection cannot fit large pans like that.  However, this will not be my final destination for copycat pop can biscuits.  These turned out tasty and stick-to-your-ribs savory, but were less of a laminated flaky pastry that is easy to break open and smother in chocolate hazelnut spread.  They also work out to be more expensive to source from Idaho.  That said, this was so educational, I am glad I gave it a try and believe I can track down the recipes to make similar bakeover mixes in Mary Jane's cookbook but using responsibly harvested ingredients that are sourced closer to home.   

Community Service Log

 Start a Community Service Journal.  Write a quick synopsis of what you did, and don't forget to record how many hours or minutes you volunteered.  To complete this [beginner] badge, you must donate a total of 10 hours of service. 

Total:  10.5 hours | 2 hours @ food shelves | 0 hours @ community gardens

1/19/2026:  2 hours.  Fallon and I helped on an assembly line to fill 571 cardboard boxes of shelf-stable items for food-insecure families on MLK day.  We signed up with my Quaker meeting, but ended up in the thick of a very sweet group of ladies who seemed to be part of some sort of fraternity/sorority/greek organization and very supportive of what little Fallon could find to do (and conversely, what I could find that was close to her).  My curious side wondered where/how they procured so many palettes of uniform food to do an assembly line.  My critic couldn't help thinking that there were more nutritionally-dense and cost effective options than cereal and juice.  How do food insecure families get fresh veg?  Fallon ultimately had fun but was hoping to be more "customer" facing in her service work.  [Parking Partners MLK, organized by OC Friends Meeting]

1/22-1/23/2026:  3 hours.  School parent group treasurer.  This was time spent doing 7 years of back book-keeping to file 10 forms the CA Department of Justice needs in order to remove our 501(c)3 suspension.  Then an excursion to the post office to mail it.  Generally, I sneak this sort of volunteer work in around the edges and don't track my hours, but this project was so big I started doing 25 minute "pomodoro" timed sessions to chip away at it.  

1/23/2026:  0.5 hours.  School parent group treasurer.  Building a prepayments list for the book sale this coming week and setting up email forwarding.  

1/24/2026:  1.5 hours.  Girl Scouts mega cookie pickup and caravan to our cookie coordinator's house.

1/26/2026: 1 hour.  Parent group at school- helping sort books for the book fair.  

1/26/2026: 0.5 hour.  Parent group treasurer building list of Venmo prepayers for the book fair.  

2/9/2026: 1 hour.  Parent group treasurer.  Book keeping bank statements and calculating the book fair revenue. 

2/11/2026: 1 hour.  Helping room parents with a Valentine's day party.  Throwing balls at a target and helping the first graders add up the total.

 

Research and write down three community organizations you could help by donating your time.  Choose one and find out how to volunteer.  

1.  OC Public Libraries:  The services provided here are so great.  It is the main way I can feel "rich" without needing to spend much and I'd love to give back for all the labor I've generated putting in book holds, and reshelving.  In addition, this branch is very convenient to many of our extracurricular activities.      

2.  City of Santa Ana Parks & Rec Community Garden:  This is walking distance from our house and helping here feels very reminiscent of an element of my favorite video game (Stardew Valley).  Fallon is interested in gardening and engaging with others on gardening topics.  I have some training with Master Gardeners and 9 years of volunteer experience there, but am letting my volunteer status lapse because I felt I needed to find a way to help out that was more complementary to parent life and hopefully reconnect with them in my empty nester season.  This space is also exciting for me because I am learning Spanish, but need more opportunities that nudge me to practice with fluent speakers.  

3.  Meals on Wheels/Tustin Senior Center:  Fallon wants to get more involved in food distribution and this place is somewhere her troop has been visiting for Christmas and in a convenient location to our regular extracurricular stomping grounds.  Hanging out with seniors is fun.  

4. [current] School Parent Group (Treasurer):  already involved, significant source of hours.  I am earning about nonprofit book keeping and how to revive a suspended nonprofit status.  

5.  [current] Girl Scouts (Troop leader):  I offered to co-lead as a way to stay in touch with some of my daughter's besties from preschool as they disbursed to different kindergartens.  They're in their 3rd year as a troop now.    

Bee Good to Your Mother Earth

Grow a vegetable garden, even if its just one zucchini plant!

We just put in 3 sets of Dixondale Texas Legend onions!  

Don't use any pesticides and synthetic fertilizers in your garden, or stop using them if you currently use them. 

I use pesticides pretty judiciously and look for the least toxic option.  The mainstays I am unwilling to give up are both organic approved:  1.  Bti a bacterium I put in areas that have chronically standing water because the Aedes mosquitoes that have moved into our region are very difficult to suppress.  2.  Bonide horticultural spray which I will use to eliminate scale which ants were repeated installing for its honeydew secretion on a prized Akebia vine and an indoor staghorn fern mealybug infestation.  For the rest of the garden, I scrape them off and celebrate lady bug larva sightings.  

On the fertilizer front, we don't fertilize much of our outdoor orchard or yard.  We hope that compost, compost tea, and mulch are enough to maintain favorable growing conditions.  On the houseplants and potted plants, I have experimented with kelp extract, Osmocote (not organic), and Miracle-Grow (not organic).  It may take several years to use their tiny containers at the application rate I use, but when I deplete the non-organics, I will replace them with Plant-Tone (as suggested by Nancy Goodwin) or other organics.  

Research organic pest control

I've had some great success taking photos of problems and asking ChatGPT to diagnose them (i.e. rust on roses, mealy bug on Staghorn).  But I generally sanity check general internet advice with my local cooperative extension's IPM website before taking action.  While integrated pest management isn't purely organic, it advocates for chemical controls as a last resort: 

" Chemical control is the use of pesticides. In IPM, pesticides are used only when needed and in combination with other approaches for more effective, long-term control. Pesticides are selected and applied in a way that minimizes their possible harm to people, nontarget organisms, and the environment. With IPM you'll use the most selective pesticide that will do the job and be the safest for other organisms and for air, soil, and water quality; use pesticides in bait stations rather than sprays; or spot-spray a few weeds instead of an entire area." 

Read Montrose: Life in a Garden by Nancy Goodwin

I had my doubts about this initially.  Nancy is focused on ornamentals in zone 8a while I am focused on edibles in zone 10b.  There seemed to be quite a hullabaloo about dragging things into and out of green houses, jerry-rigging cold frames and mourning the loss of tropical plants to frost which grow like weeds around here.  Yet I found a kindred spirit in the struggles of caretaking an historic property, coexisting with a neighboring elementary school, admiring the Bloomsbury group creatives, desperate strategies for keeping cool working in the heat and hydrated during droughts, and befriending feral cats.  

She seems to have a massive work ethic.  She is out gardening until 6 PM.  She got 10 hours of daylight and spent 8 of them in the gardens.  I feel gassed after 10 minutes.  I wonder how to build my endurance up and suspect that part of it is leaning into something one finds deeply interesting and part of it is the fellowship of her husband and 4 staff "body doubling" alongside her.  

I still wonder about her process.  It seems she took notes on her activities daily but summarized them monthly for the sake of the book.  Perhaps I could adopt a similar approach.  She seems to have maintained quite an archive as the diary is littered with comparisons about plants emerging early or late relative to past years.  Although soporific reading, I am impressed by her precision with scientific names.  It reminded me a bit of the Garden of Eden in Genesis and Adam and Eve's only job was to stroll around naming things.  It also seemed to assert that the "audience" for this text was future Nancy and her staff rather than going out of her way to onboard us bystanders.      

Does anyone else struggle with reconciling artistic drawings of plants with their real life appearance?  I find I favor seed catalogs that use photographs of the plant rather than artwork and only after I can recognize a plant on sight do I feel I can appreciate an artist's rendering of it.  Still give Ippy kudos for honing her illustration skills.  Now I know to try warm water and isopropyl alcohol to preserve cut flowers if I try my hand at it as well.  It seems like a satisfying meditative activity.  

Kingsolver mentioned in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that east coast gardening is about removing the unwanted while west coast gardeners start with a blank slate and water what they want into existence.  Goodwin sees it as "set design" and the change in perspective not by what we add but what we remove.  (pg 79).    

In terms of organic gardening, it seems she is not a purist.  She swears by Plant-Tone fertilizer, which is organic, makes and constantly reapplies a home brew tabasco deer repellent and  seems to be importing a lot of leaves to supplement her compost pile.  All very organic.  She also swears by Miracle Gro fortnightly in her pots through their blooming season, which gave me pause as I am not nearly so heavy handed with Osmocote on my potted house plants.   

Other favorite quotes: 

"A plant that grows well enough to see its own seedlings is in the right place." 48

"I feel uneasy being in style."  59

"I organize every day around weather reports." 144

"I feel a slight unease if I don't work outside for at least part of each day." 262

Carpe Cocoa! Mmmm Chocolate!

YC Beginner:

Ask your librarian for a book about the history of chocolate for children. Some suggestions: Smart About Chocolate! by Sandra Markle, No Monkeys, No Chocolate by Melissa Stewart and Alan Young, or Chocolate: Riches from the Rainforest by Robert Burleigh.

Over the past year, we have read all three. Fallon's favorite was No Monkeys, No Chocolate because it had a funny, repetitive title and could be read independently in the back seat of the car. Mom's favorite was Markle's Smart About book because it could be read in one snack sitting and summarized the main points from the Coe's book about chocolate for grown ups. Burleigh's book was the burliest with text-heavy pages that required reading in installments, but we agreed that it had the most realistic and interesting pictures. Prior to joining the sisterhood, we even visited a chocolate plantation on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Fallon's cousins are honorary chocolate experts because one the rental car keys got locked inside the car by accident and they had a whole day devoted to taste testing different chocolate varietals while waiting for AAA to rescue them.

YC Intermediate:

Sample 3 different types of chocolate: dark, milk and white. Can you taste the difference with your eyes closed? Which was your favorite?

We had a Ghirardelli flight which we hid in plastic eggs to blind taste test. We both liked 60% Cacao. Fallon had to spit out 100% cacao. Mommy wanted to spit out white chocolate but that tied for first place with Fallon. Strangely, Fallon preferred 60% to semi-sweet despite its 2 grams less sugar. We studied the labels and discovered they have 9-7-5-0 grams of sugar per serving respectively.



Pick out a chocolate recipe to make with your farmgirl mentor.



Balboa peninsula is close to our house and famous for square Klondike-like Balboa Bars and chocolate covered bananas. Every few months, we have a "banana emergency" when several racks of bananas in ripen in the yard and our little family of 3 has to figure out how to eat/freeze/donate several hundred pounds of bananas in short order. They are like the zucchini of southern California. We found the smaller sized variety is perfect for sticking a popsicle stick in, freezing, and then dipping in tempered chocolate and refreezing. If you have extra chocolate, you can dip strawberries in to use it up (they hold up a little better in the fridge than the freezer). The zeppelin-sized bananas on our other tree work better cut in half so a kid has a prayer of being able to finish it. In a pinch, if you don't have chocolate chips to temper, you can dunk the pops in a deep container of Nutella. Mom is still tinkering about how to dilute the tempered chocolate to make a thinner coating with cocoa butter.



YC Advanced:

Make your own chocolate recipe and serve to your family. Tell them about the process of chocolate making while they're sampling.

Fallon experimented with a few recipes (chocolate mug cakes, chocolate mochi wrappers, hot chocolate) but we always come back to some variation on chocolate covered banana popsicles. Sometimes they are dusted with peanuts, sometimes with unicorn horn sprinkles, sometimes dunked in a Costco-sized vat of Nutella instead of tempered chocolate chips. While we taste-test these, we page through the three titles in the beginner section which are now a cherished part of our library.

Read the book or watch the film, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Bonus points for doing both.

Can we apply for bonus-bonus points? We read Roald Dahl's book, then watched both the 1971 and 2005 adaptations, comparing the use of Squirrels vs. Golden Geese and the portrayal of Oompa Loompas. We then hosted Fallon's fifth birthday in a park around a Charlie theme. We invited guests with a mini candy bar wrapped up with a golden ticket that some of her friends parents comment that their kids kept even 2 years later. Guests could then visit stations where they dressed up as Mike TV with funny sunglasses and "teleported" across the playground, Violet Beauregard in a giant inflatable blueberry bubble and optional blue face zinc sunscreen, or Augustus Gloop at the hot chocolate bar.










********

Beginner:

Read The True History of Chocolate by Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe.

Finished and posted on Goodreads around this time last year. The research in this book fueled a trifold poster board presentation we shared at my daughter's history festival while they ground away at maize and cacao beans.

 





Sample your local chocolate artisan's wares. Learn the difference between dark, milk, white, etc.

I discovered Royce Origin chocolates on a field trip to an Asian grocery store/Ramen shop (Mitsuwa). The flavor notes (pictured below) were very helpful to build a starting vocabulary about bitterness, fruitiness, floral, etc. once I translated them from Japanese. From there, I branched out to the online merchant Caputo's to better understand if *all* Ecuadorian chocolate is floral, what percentage of cacao is interesting and palatable for nibbling, etc.



Intermediate:

Learn about cocoa beans: where they're found, and the work that goes into turning them into chocolate.

From perusing the single origin chocolate interactive maps on the Caputo's website, I had moved on to reading Rowan Jacobsen's book Wild Chocolate last August 2025. This helped bring me up to modern times with the chocolate industry. Now I can better appreciate the difficulty in standardizing fermentation protocol across numerous small growers and how allowing some wiggle room for differences can create so many different nuanced flavors.

Learn how to temper chocolate.




I would not say my chocolate tempering is fail-proof yet. The "melt" step is straight-forward with a double boiler and I usually quit when the end result is workable rather than keeping an eye trained on a thermometer. I am experimenting with holding 1/3 of my chips back to add once the original chips reach 115* F in order to drop the temp of the combined mixture down to 82*-85*F and then put it back on the heat to bring it back up to 88*F since our chips are right at that borderline between milk and dark chocolate. I would say for the Balboa Banana "Emergencies" the factors which are higher priority to me than perfect tempering are (1) thinning the chocolate with cocoa butter so that I can cover more bananas with the same amount of chips (while simultaneously increasing the fruit:added sugar ratio for my kid's dessert of choice). (2) dipping a frozen banana (or a dozen) into the mixture dramatically drops the temperature of the dwindling volume of chocolate. So I am puzzling out how to keep the finish smooth on those final bananas when the mixture is starting to seize up and get lumpy. Do you have any tips? Please share?



Make two different chocolate recipes that you've never tried before. Remember, chocolate doesn't have to be sweet; it can be savory, too. (Try a Mexican mole, a delicious sauce used in enchiladas.)








Mole Negro [12/24/2025] - made with a starter from a favorite Oaxacan restaurant. I modified the recipe a lot (canned tomatoes vs. tomato sauce, miso paste vs. chicken broth, Ghirardelli squares vs. "authentic Oaxacan chocolate," and slightly less overall liquid because I was worried about boil over). This made a flavorful salsa to cover several jars of "glass burritos" which are basically just prepped beans and a few toppings as an easy re-heatable meal. We also found this mole was helpful to add a kick to Mexican rice we cooked intentionally mild to be accessible for Fallon. Eventually, I was even using it in lieu of salad dressing!

Copycat Nutella [12/28/2025] - a while ago, Fallon and I reached an agreement that if she started the day working through piano exercises, there would be a Grand's style biscuit slathered in Nutella (or equivalent) waiting for her at breakfast. She's in her 3rd method book and we have gone through so many of those cardboard pop rolls and those nut butter jars that are just a little too gooey to recycle in good faith but then get all weird and distorted when you try to clean them with super hot water. Our local grocery doesn't stock Nutella brand (which has palm oil as its second ingredient which is a bit cringe-worthy anyway) and the alternative includes almonds which really mute the hazelnut notes. So when I found a Vitamix blender under the Christmas tree, I was anxious to try making some copycat nut butters I could decant into the classic mason jar and give myself a zero waste gold star. Well, what they don't show on the videos is how often these puppies overheat (or maybe I just have a dud?). It overheated blending frozen bananas! But I digress. Many 40 minute cooldowns later, I have a delicate jar of "Belletella" from following chocolatecoveredkatie's recipe. I added milk to thin it to a spreadable consistency so I store it in the fridge instead of considering it shelf-stable. But it is so good! You know those things you are relieved are a little fussy to make so you have a prayer of achieving your body composition goals? Yep. This is one. and I am sitting slightly prettier on my January trash audit! Here it is on some "I Might Die Tomorrow" white bread from a MJF cookbook.












Expert: To be continued!

Learn how to make ganache.

Try an authentic hot-chocolate drink. If no one in town offers one, learn to make it yourself and share the results. What makes it different than the overly-sweet concoctions you get from the envelope?






Host a Truffle Party. Make and serve at least 4 different types of homemade chocolate truffles.