We’ve been making homemade ice cream for over a year. Super delicious and healthy. Ok, maybe not healthy, but I can pronounce all the ingredients.

The downside to homemade ice cream is all the leftover egg whites. Before you read much further, you should know there’s some serious girl talk below.

Each batch of ice cream uses 8 egg yolks. So, Veronica and I decided that we have to make angel food cake for each 1.5 times we make ice cream. Hint: angel food cake uses lots of egg whites.

This week, we also somehow had some leftover yolks and a ton of lemons. Some quick googling determined that we also needed to make lemon curd to pour over our angel food cake.

We had no idea exactly how many egg whites were in the unlabelled tupperware shoved at the back of the fridge. Veronica developed a new scientific method I’ll call egg-white-metrology.

If you don’t whip the egg whites first, you can gloup them into a bowl one at a time. They will slurp out in a clump, one at a time.

“Why are egg whites gloupy?” Cue the biology lesson.

I figured, she’s now 12 and has already had “the talk”. It’s time to talk about ovulation and mucus.

We discussed about how women can know the time of month that they are fertile, and the physical signs of ovulation. In fertility books, it literally says when your mucus is the consistency of egg white that you are most fertile.

We also discussed a bit about the emotional signs of ovulation. “This is the time of month when Momma is most joyful and patient. When everything seems to be going fantastic in the universe. When I’m not bothered as much by the annoying sounds your younger brother makes.”

And then we moved on to the discussion of how science can hide these signs. Artificial birth control evens out the cycle a bit. The highs and lows of the month are more level. Since she’s already studied a bit of trigonometry, I explained that without birth control, it’s like your emotional roller coaster wave has a higher amplitude. With birth control, there can be a lower amplitude, or worse, similar amplitude, but the whole wave may be translated lower on the axes – meaning both lower lows and lower highs than you would have had naturally.

The physical signs are different as well. Your body doesn’t produce the same mucus. It is biologically tricked into thinking it’s at a different time in the cycle.

Just as quickly, we moved from trigonometry into algebra. It was time to make the lemon curd.

We needed 4 egg yolks and 3 whole eggs. We had 3 eggs yolks and an egg white. So she figured two whole eggs and two egg yolks would get us there. Here is the recipe I used, but with 1/2 cup of sugar, rather than 3/4 cup. We like our food tart.

Tempering your emotions and your eggs.

When making lemon curd, you get to do lots of whisking. Some people look at this as a chore. I choose to view it as the only time my arms get a workout. It’s only my right arm, but I’ll take it.

The lemon curd was fantastic atop the angel food cake, but it was really the talk that made the time valuable.

Next up… combating anorexia through cooking.