My way of introducing the method is to perform blind tests on grilled meats. It’s been a huge hit with my daughter—every time we get ready to cook on the weekend she asks if we’re doing another blind test. We’ve already explored if salt will tenderize meat. If you don’t want to click the link, the answer is nope. Negatory.

Today we moved on to test if lemon juice tenderizes meat. From what I’ve been told, lemon juice contains enzymes that break down the proteins in the meat, thus rendering it more tender. Which seems reasonable to me.

The process is simple: Buy two slabs of meat—in our case, flat iron steaks, since they make wicked good burrito fillings—subject one piece of the meat to marinating in lemon juice for an hour, and leave the other as a control. Then the meat is grilled and my wife and daughter perform a taste test.

In this case, they both picked the wrong meat. So for short runs, I’m calling lemon juice snake oil. It’s quite possible marinating in lemon juice overnight would yield different results, but you know, that would take much more planning than I’m willing to put into this.

So far we’ve performed two tests and both have been negative. I hope to find one that actually works for the next time.

Stay tuned to the next episode of BBQing with SCIENCE!.

“No, honey.”

“Why?”

“Because it didn’t exist when I was a kid.”

Pause.

“OH! ‘Cause it’s in color!“

If you need me, I’ll be in the garage thinking about death.

“I hate school.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way. What is it you don’t like about school?”

“We have to work all the time.”

“But after school, when you get a job, you’ll have to work even more.”

Sigh. Pause. Smile: “But then I’ll get money.”

Andrea’s cunning scheme has been to barely nibble on dinner, and then a few minutes later complain about being hungry and wanting a snack. Us parental figures, on the other hand, would like her to ACTUALLY EAT THE FOOD we cooked for her after coming home from a long day at work when we’d much rather plop down on the couch.

’Cause we’re Nazi that way.

The other day she had one of her wants-a-snack moments, and we informed her that, no, there will in fact not be a snack tonight, like we talked to you about a million times.

This was not popular. So she went to the TV room, where she has her pens and papers, slammed the door and went to work.

Here are the results.

Door with signs

Dad is not a favroit

Mom is not a favroit

Even though not being a “favroit” is obviously difficult, there are several things I’m proud of here. One, she says please. Politeness is important. Second, even though there’s a lot of creative spelling, notice that she misspells the same way on both sheets. So, like her dad, she may be wrong, but dagnabbit, she’s CONSISTENT.

And now I guess it’s time to go transfer my Smiths collection to her computer…

Thursday night we’re at the kitchen table working with her to wrap up the week’s work, and of course she’s getting tired and antsy to do something else.

“Let’s finish this. You only have one more sentence to write.”

“You write it.”

“No, I can’t write your sentences for you. It’s your homework.”

“Well, write slowly so the teacher thinks it was me.”

To the best of my knowledge she’s never heard the old, “I know you don’t read fast, so I’m writing this slowly” gag…

As any parent of a seven-year-old can tell you, it’s hard to be away from your child for an extended period of time, but daily e-mail reports from my parents and the knowledge that she’s not spending her summer in the miserable Arizona heat makes it easier to bear. Even though we miss her like crazy, it’s nice to know she’s getting a real summer experience instead of being cooped up in a sweltering day camp.

So today we received a letter in the mail:

The First Letter Home

After I wiped the tears from laughing too hard, I had two thoughts: 1) My little girl is growing up; and 2) She’s getting pretty good at drawing.

And it’s always good to see the Lindh genes are still in full effect.

So for a while now Andrea has been running around the house with a Flip camera. There’s very little footage that’s actually usable, but she sure has fun.

Embedded here is a short compilation that I do believe adequately illustrates why so many parents of small children look so tired. Man, if I could bottle that energy and sell it…

High energy from Nic Lindh on Vimeo.

As a nerd aside, the footage was taken with a Flip, assembled and color corrected in Final Cut Pro, the audio sweetened and the loop added in Soundtrack Pro.

Andrea gone tribal

As any father should, I of course think my daughter is the most special person in the world, but she is such a clone of her mother I sometimes wonder where all my genes went.

I was reminded that they’re most certainly in there working their chemical magic the other day when I took her along for a walk. Me on foot and her on her beloved Razor scooter.

After a while she started getting tired of scootering and wanted me to carry the scooter. Okay, no problem. Then she thought I was walking too fast—speed being the reason she had the scooter with her in the first place.

So we were walking along, her a few steps behind me, when I heard her mutter under her breath, “This is so stupid.”

Yep, there they are, the Lindh genes.

As a nerd aside, note how good the audio is—it’s the Flip’s built-in crappy mic, but I cleaned it up with Soundtrack Pro, which is pretty much like sprinkling fairy dust all over bad audio.

The actual presentation was given by a woman from the Arizona Science Center and involved fun and interesting things to do with liquid nitrogen. The children were highly amused by the flash-freezing of various objects like metal, racquet balls, onions, and bananas.

At the start of the presentation, the presenter had seven balloons, and asked the crowd how many of those she could fit into the small liquid nitrogen container. Turns out, she could fit all of them.

At which point it was incredibly hard to not yell, “Burn the witch! Burn her!“

So, I guess I still have some work to do on this “maturity” thing.