Cooking unit

I believe it was in third grade that we had some kind of basic cooking unit - we had a large class that was presided over by two teachers. One was tall and Lois-Smith-esque, the other was a little wispier and played "House At Pooh Corner" on the guitar (hello, mid-70s.)

I think the unit was all combined with something to do with the "Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle" stories. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, if you haven't read the books, specialized in finding cures for children with behavioral problems like answering back, interrupting, not wanting to go to bed, bickering, and being a cry-baby. The cures sometimes were as simple as parents bickering the way the children do (so they can see the pointlessness of it), or bizarre - a powder blown on an "interrupter" that makes one become temporarily mute. I need to order up some of that.

Well, in the cooking unit, we made chocolate pudding - I think the goal was to learn how to follow directions. And also to have delicious pudding. After making it, I became briefly obsessed with pudding. And by "briefly" I mean "from then until the present day."

I hadn't quite figured out that not all chocolaty powders were the same - I was convinced that Nestle's Quik would turn into pudding, too. Of course, all I ever managed to make with Nestle's Quik was super-thick chocolate sludge. But that suited my purposes just fine.

I took it upon myself to make prop versions of some of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's "cures." I remember I manufactured some sort of dust out of powdered chalk, and created something else out of aluminum foil. I brought the props in and proudly presented them to the teaching-and-guitar-playing duo. They were very nice about it.

I'm sure they expected me to eventually go mad.