COOKING WITH UNCLE JOHN

What do you say we make a big bowl of snot? What ingredients are used to make fake snot? Pretty much the same ones that make real snot: protein, sugar, and water. Now, let’s get cooking!

Recipe: You’ll need an adult to help you with this recipe. First, heat the water in a pan until it boils. Remove it from the heat and sprinkle in the packages of gelatin. Let this mixture soften a few minutes and then stir it with a fork. Add enough corn syrup to make 1 cup of thin, goopy glop. Stir the glop with the fork. While you’re stirring it, lift the fork to pull out long strands of snot. As the “snot” begins to cool, it will thicken. Add more water, if you need to, a spoonful at a time, to keep it nice and slimy.

Say it out loud: “It looks like boogers but it’s not.”

EXTRA BONUS: FAKE BOOGERS!

You can make fake boogers, too. Real boogers are formed when mucus coats a tiny dust particle in your nose and then dries out and hardens.

That’s how you make fake boogers, too. Just take the fake snot, toss in about a pinch of dust and…eureka! You’ve got fake boogers! Now go wipe one on a wall. You could even put one in your friend’s sandwich…

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HE’S GONNA BLOW!

When you have a cold, you just reach for a box of tissue to help you with your snotty noses. But before there were disposable tissues, people carried handkerchiefs, or “snot rags”—a practice that started more than 2,000 years ago in Rome.

Of course, people didn’t always use hankies. Many people just wiped their noses on their sleeves. But in the 1500s King Francis I of France thought it was gross and decided to put a stop to the filthy habit. He ordered buttons sewn on all men’s coat sleeves to make them use their handkerchiefs instead of their sleeves. In the 1700s, Admiral Nelson had buttons sewn on the sleeves of all all British naval uniforms for the same reason, as did Napoleon for the French military in the 1800s.

And that’s why men’s coats have buttons on their sleeves today.

Q: What was the Barbie doll’s first “job?” A: She was a flight attendant in 1961.