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W eird science? Just step into the kitchen In the dim light of the refrigerator bulb, the thing in the pan wiggled and jiggled and shimmered when I poked it. Home from work late, I'd gone looking for leftover pizza. That's when I saw what appeared to be my favorite 9-by-13-inch glass baking dish filled with something very strange. It was a sheet of clear-looking goop scattered with moist white blobs, long red strings and tiny, green mounds. Thinking I'd abandoned some leftovers too long, I pulled it from the fridge and headed toward the sink. "No, wait!" cried my husband, who entered the kitchen just as I was about to wash the thing down the drain. "That's your son's science project!" I stopped the faucet, barely averting disaster. Then I looked more closely at the thing in the pan. If I'd recalled my college botany class, I would have recognized it immediately as a 3-D model of plant cell. Who wouldn't? After all, you had your basic white grape Jello cell filled with your basic licorice whip cell wall, your marshmallow vacuoles and your pistachio nut mitochondrion. You had your typical vanilla wafer nucleus, your gel icing chromosomes, your green pea chloroplasts. Sheesh, what kind of a mother was I, failing to recognize a scientific masterpiece in the making? In my defense, I have to say this wasn't the first time strange science has showed up in my kitchen, assigned for not. I check regularly on homework, but my kids have been known to launch into hands-on projects entirely on their own. Take the rock candy debacle, for instance. Assigned to create crystals for a fifth-grade science project, my son set glasses of super-saturated sugar water and string on several kitchen counters. He figured he'd make a few crystals for class, then eat the rest of the rock candy that resulted. All fine and good, but he wasn't the only creature with a sweet tooth. When lines of tiny little black ants began climbing the walls and crossing the counters in search of the syrup, the class project was abruptly canceled. In the space where the kid was supposed to note results, I thought he should simply write: "Bugs." Then there was the time my daughter made Malaysian coconut balls for a fourth-grade report on that southeast Asian nation. She followed the recipe in the tattered cookbook carefully, mixing and forming dough, grating fresh coconut and rolling the round dumplings until they were thoroughly coated. Never mind that the kitchen was spattered with coconut milk and bits of broken shell. Never mind that the cookies seemed a little underdone even after baking for the allotted time. My 9-year-old proudly carried the platter of white blobs to her class and offered them for public consumption. "Eww! This takes like soap!" came the first comment. Mortified, my daughter brought her coconut balls back home, where they promptly clogged the garbage disposal. Like other parents of curious kids, I've learned to view these experiments as the learning experiences they are. So I open the freezer to find tiny jars filled with frozen colored water. So I head into the pantry for cereal and encounter a plastic-wrapped piece of bread morphing into penicillin. So the refrigerator is stocked with glasses of unidentifiable liquid posing as my son's latest milkshake "project." When the venture gets too gross, I simply throw it out. In the meantime, I'm stuck with a half-dozen boxes of white grape Jello. Guess I'll have to make the Creamy Fruit Medley Salad Mold you'll find below. Creamy Fruit Medley Salad Mold 1 cup boiling water 1 package (4-serving size) gelatin dessert, any flavor, (sparkling white grape will do) 1 cup cold water or apple juice 1 1/2 cups thawed nondairy whipped topping 1 cup diced fresh fruit (do not use pineapple, kiwi, papaya, figs or guava) Stir boiling water into gelatin in medium bowl at least 2 minutes or until completely dissolved. Stir in cold water. Refrigerate about 1 1/4 hours, or until slightly thickened (mixture will be the consistency of unbeaten egg whites.) Gently stir in whipped topping with a wire whisk until smooth. Refrigerate about 15 minutes or until thickened (a spoon drawn through the mixture will leave a definite impression.) Refrigerate 4 hours or until firm. Unmold. Garnish as desired. Send questions to A la carte, P.O. Box 1108, Medford, OR 97501. Reach JoNel Aleccia at 776-4465 or by e-mail at [email protected] Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA