House Capuchin 3

This is in date order as we started got the idea within a week of the 2017 feast, tested the foods, some repeatedly, and finally got into the big push to get done in time.

If you wade through the whole thing, you can see that this was a year-long process as we came up with the idea, started the research, made various foods, re-made to test the recipes, decided which ones to use, came up with a tentative menu in the fall, refined, refined and refined the lists and then made the foods over several months, adding in some at the last weeks when Anja found better instructions for some that she had hoped to make.

…and then as feasts do, things went awry and not everything got made, but there was plenty!

Week of 2/19/17 – Gogor and Anja came up with the idea of next year’s feast being Slavic Foods and that’s being kicked around. We also talked over what worked and didn’t with this past feast and tried to work out how to do it better next time.

Week of 3/5/17

Links for Potluck foods! 

• Period Food is Yummy: What to Bring to an SCA Potluck
• https://lelandra.com/joan/potlucktoc.htm
• http://www.damehelen.com/food/potlucks.shtml
• http://chatelaine.sca-caid.org/newcomers/mundanefood.php

Asparagus! – https://ritaroberts.wordpress.com/2014/12/27/cuisine-in-the-roman-world-an-update/

Growing Leeks from Seed – http://www.almanac.com/video/growing-leeks-seed

Week of 3/12/17

Project Day

We started the day with sorting out clean feast gear. Anja spent a little time on spoons.

When what Anja had planned for a feast dish, turned out to not be doable since the ingredients weren’t there, so she looked up some recipes and made the cabbage pottage below and a creamed chicken dish at the last 2nd.

When Amy and Stella got there we started on the fruit, pickles, bread and butter and nuts. Eventually we got around to the pottage and chicken, then finished up with the cookies! There was a lot of “ooh” and lip-smacking over Loren’s wine. 🙂

We ended up talking butchering, mostly of chicken, but also frogs, and then about bats, hypnotizing chickens and foods.

Potluck Menu

• Cabbage, onion and leek pottage – Anja and Loren
• Creamed chicken (1 can cream of chicken soup, two cooked, chopped chicken breasts, handful of chopped garlic that had been cooked in a dab of butter)  – Anja and Loren
• Grapes – Estrella
• Almonds – Estrella
• fresh fruit box (pineapple, grapes, strawberries) Amy
• Loren’s blackberry wine
• Bread – Loren
• Garlic butter – Anja
• Bacon/Blue butter – Anja
• pickled garbanzo beans – Anja
• Pickled Eggs – Anja and Loren
• asparagus pickle – Anja
• black olives – Loren
• cookies – Estrella

Cabbage, Leek and Onion pottage – This was a last-minute brainstorm on Anja’s part, since what she had planned wasn’t going to work. If time allows, chopping the coleslaw and making your own broth is the hot tip.

• 3 large leeks
• 2 small or 1 1/2 medium onions
• 2 bags of deli cole slaw mix
• 1 tsp coriander
• salt
• 1 box of chicken broth

1. Chop leeks, onions, cabbage to “deli slaw” size (1/4 inch slices, tops)
2. Heat broth with coriander (and any necessary salt) to boiling.
3. Add ingredients and cook until done.
4. Taste test and add salt if necessary.
5. Serve hot.

…and good “adds” to this to make it a main dish are either cooked crumbled bacon or chopped ham.

Updated Pages

• Potluck Foods – http://wp.me/p8ngGY-8u
• Perioid Food from the Grocery – http://wp.me/p8ngGY-eB
• List of Period/Non-Period Foods – http://wp.me/p8ngGY-d5
• A List of Medieval Cheeses – http://wp.me/p8ngGY-5W

Week of 3/19/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – Loren and Anja were initially the only ones there for this, and then Amy got there as the cheese was being strained. Not sure whether folks forgot or missed the announcement, but we went ahead and started at 5:10. Anja had been grinding and measuring spices before that and getting pictures, but that’s when the milk went onto the burner. At about 5:50 it started to foam and Anja tossed in the vinegar and pulled it off the heat. At 6:15 it was in the cheesecloth and hanging up to drain. At about 7:15 Anja took it down and boxed it, pressing it down as though it were being molded and then stuck it into the fridge. The whey went back into the milk containers and was frozen. (Anja uses it for chowder base!)

Ingredients

Cooking

Straining

…and the next day.

The cheese turned out tasty, and wasn’t overly salty on Friday, although it *had* been on Thursday before the salt melted in. This kind of cheese doesn’t keep all that long and the salt will help keep it from going bad. the whey was awfully milky and Anja thinks it might not have been hot enough when the vinegar went in.

Anja and Loren are talking about how to make some molds, rather than buying them, since our quantities are going to be small. Molds that make cheeses like this one…. >>>>

 

Week of 4/9/17

Having a lot of fun this week with various projects! The cheese was a success. The mustard was a success (even if it’s the darkest mustard we’ve ever seen!) Other foods got made. We had guests from the Valley at the potluck.

Early Week – Anja set up a Cheese and Wine night for a group of people who aren’t part of the household, but were interested in the cheese-making.

Cheese and Wine Workshop – Thursday

We started a little later than Anja had hoped, waiting for someone, but gradually setting up. Once the last person arrived we moved out to the front to snack a bit (the ladies brought cheese, bread, crackers and garlic jam!) and do the first part of things which needed to be what we were doing with the cheese.

Eventually we moved into the back, got the spices ready, poured in the milk and started and it took over 1 1/2 hours to get the stuff up to temperature! Or close enough that stuff would curdle, at least. The whey was still a bit milky, but not quite so much as last time. We think that it was the hotplate cutting in and out that made it take so long, but eventually it was frothing and we put in the vinegar.

It curdled beautifully and with much more cheese than last time, leaving only about an 1/2 gallon of whey. It “broke” from the cheesecloth very cleanly, unlike the last batch when we had to do a lot of scraping. After letting it cool a bit, we packed the molds and weighted them and left it to stand overnight. One lady took home the frozen whey from the last batch and we got the next into the freezer. Anja unmolded and fridged the cheese Friday morning.

Herb Bunch – Saturday

We had decided to make batch of hot wine mustard, because we needed it for the Mylates, but also because it’s tasty, 🙂 and we’ve been out for awhile. The mustard took forever to grind. It’s amazing, but a teaspoon takes a minute or so. An 1/2 cup took an hour with Loren and Anja taking turns with the pestle! We used a small hole sieve to get the already powdered stuff divided from the whole seeds 4 times and finally ended up with just that last tablespoon. Anja got all the ingredients measured into a cookpot while Loren went to get the balsamic vinegar that we had forgotten.

Hot Wine Mustard

• 1/2 C dry mustard
• 1/4 C honey
• 1/4 C balsamic vinegar
• ¼ cup red wine (yes, red wine, although you’ll see port in the pix, which is what we had. Wine turns it purple!)
• 1 T olive oil
• 1 t salt
• 1/2 t ginger
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 t garlic powder
• 1/2 t horseradish (or more, Anja tends to used more like a tablespoon)

Place all ingredients in a small saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until mixture thickens (this only takes a few minutes). Store in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a few months. Great as a sauce on bread.

Project Day – Sunday

Anja and Loren started by setting up the pork pies and starting the bread. While the bread was rising they ran around picking up and cleaning up to get ready for the day. Eventually Loren took off with the pies and the bread to go bake it and Anja sat down with some sorting-of-supplies tasks. When Loren came in with the bread and pork pies (mylates),  Anja got up and helped Loren get the back sorted the rest of the way out and the rest of the foods heated, then we all sat down to eat, and *did* we eat! Oh, yum!

Potluck Menu – Sunday

• Mylates of Pork – Loren and Anja
• Sweet Ginger Carrots – Anja
• Hot mustard sauce – Anja – Recipe above
• Bread – Loren
• Rolls – Alys
• Cheese (Brie and Cheddar) – Alys
• Rice pudding with strawberry topping – Louisa – recipe here: http://www.medievalcuisine.com/site/medievalcuisine/Euriol/recipe-index/rys
• Shortbread cookies – Estrella
• Cheese – Cheese Ladies – (A couple of Sunday pix in the Cheese section above….)
• Butter – Loren

Anja’s Mylates of Pork Recipe (pork pie)

• 2 pounds ground pork
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup mozzarella, grated
• 1 big glop (about 2 TBSP) of hot wine mustard
• 1/4 cup hazelnuts (forgot!)
• 1 tsp Ginger (All spices approximate, I just shook)
• 1/8 tsp clove
• 1/8 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• pinch saffron
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• pastry for a double-crust pie (leftovers, re-rolled)

1. Thaw two frozen deep dish pie shells and set out two top crusts to warm to room temp
2. In a large bowl mix eggs, spices, nuts and mustard.
3. Add ground pork and fluff with a fork. Mix with grated cheese and onion.
4. Pack into crust.
5. Put on top crust, crimp and cut.
6. Bake at 350 for about 1 ½ hours or until internal temp reads at least 160F.

From Forme of Cury – “MYLATES OF PORK. XX.VII. XV. Hewe Pork al to pecys and medle it with ayrenn & chese igrated. Do þerto powdour fort safroun & pyneres [1] with salt, make a crust in a trape, bake it wel þerinne, and serue it forth.”

Week of 4/16/17

All Fool’s – Event – Saturday – Anja

After my stuff got brought into the hall, I sorted out my potluck contributions (lots of little stuff: the mustard, some garlic butter, honey butter, the cheese wheel and a lentil pottage that had been frozen, but was put into a crockpot borrowed from Temperance and Tryggr for the day.) got it all into serving plates/bowls and with utensils and Seamus got it to the table.

Week of 5/7/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – We found a recipe for Schiz (pronounced Skee, apparently) an Italian cheese that is fried before eating. We had been talking about it all week, but finally managed to get all the pieces together on Friday and started in. It called for heating the milk slowly, and it took 45 minutes to get up to temperature. We added caraway, dill and celery seed to the milk as it warmed.

At 8:30 the rennet went in and at 9 went back and checked. No break! …. so heated the milk back up the 5 degrees it had lost and added an 1/2 tab of a different rennet. Kinda crossed our fingers and prayed. 🙂 …`The next time the curd “broke” so went on with cutting the curd, then cooking some more. By 10:30 the curd had cooked and the whey was starting to look right, so we started draining the whey. We had to use two cloths because the cloth we started with was too thick! (The cheesecloth had gone walkabout….again!) …and re-appeared 10 minutes after we had grabbed something else.

By 11, it was all hanging and cooling. By 11:20 it was still dripping, only molded in the cloth like some of the italian cheeses, but it hadn’t been salted, which it didn’t say in the recipe when to do! We broke up the mostly-dripped-out curd, salted, squoze and re-hung and it went into the fridge, along with the re-bottled whey. It was tasty both with and without the salt, but it’s definitely a damp cheese. I see why this one gets sliced and fried. Ricotta from the whey tomorrow!

…and then fridged overnight to drip some more, which it did very little of. The pot below was dry.

Anja says, “Sunday evening, I pulled out the cheese, sliced it and then fried some. ….omgs…. I haven’t had fried cheese that good in a long, long time! You can only do that with cheeses that don’t melt. My Baba used to get a cheese with a similar texture from a local Czech butcher shop, but they closed before I was a teenager. I haven’t found any cheese that worked as well until now!” The thing is that the not-expensive American cheese *all* melt. We haven’t been able to afford an artisanal cheese and this qualifies.

The process was rather similar to this one, except we didn’t press it.

Schiz – NICOLO SANTORIO·TUESDAY, MAY 2, 2017 – Schiz (pronounced “skee”) is a fresh cow’s milk cheese from the Dolomites in Northern Italy. It’s only good for a few days and is fried in a pan before eating, usually served with polenta.

Ingredients:

• 1 gallon of milk (not ultra-pasteurized)
• Liquid rennet (1/4 tsp) or 1/4 tablet.
• (optional) Calcium chloride for pasteurized cold stored milk

Tools

• Good thermometer.
• Large pot
• Ladle
• Knife or cake spatula to cut the curds
• A basket molds or any other good draining mold.

1. Pour the milk in to the clean pot and heat milk slowly to 96° F (35° C), then take it off the heat source.
2. Add 1/4 tsp (1.25ml) single strength rennet or ~ 1/4 tablet. Stir for one minute with an up and down motion with the spoon or ladle, then stop the milk moving with a slight back stir.
3. Put a lid on and leave milk to set for 30 minutes.
4. Cut the coagulated curd in a grid pattern with your knife, with about 1-2 cm between cuts, keeping the knife vertical. Allow this to set for 2-3 minutes while the whey begins to show in the cuts. Then cut again following the existing cuts, but this time hold the knife at a 45 degree angle. Be gentle so you don’t mash the curds up.
5. Return to the heat and set to very low, continuing to monitor the temperature so that it doesn’t go above 120°. The total cooking time will be 20-30 minutes. The longer it is cooked, the drier the final cheese will be. The final curds should be cooked well through and should be examined to make sure that enough moisture has been removed. A broken curd should be firm throughout and the curds should have a moderate resistance when pressed between the fingers.
6. Remove the whey with a ladle to about an inch above the surface of the curds. Leaving a bit of whey for the transfer will help the cheese consolidate.
7. Transfer the curds to the basket mold and allow the whey to drain. A small amount of weight (1-2 lbs) can help consolidate the curd and produce a slightly drier curd, but this is optional. I use just a bit of hand pressure to consolidate the cheese. Turn the curds as they drain and firm up. Doing this several times during the draining will keep the moisture even.
8. The draining cheese should be placed in the refrigerator as soon as the whey drainage slows, but with a bowl underneath to collect the small amount of whey that continues to drain. Schiz should be used within a few days at most.

To cook, slice up and fry in a pan with butter and a pinch of salt. Cream can be added. Serve with polenta or wide cut pasta like Pappardelle.

Week of 5/21/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – Amor was here for a quick visit. He’s Loren and Anja’s son that’s in the Air Force. He’s moving to Eskalya in Oertha. He wanted to see cheese being made, so that happened Wednesday night and then the cheese got fried on Thursday!

He liked it and took 1/2 with him on the next leg of his trip!

What was even funnier was that his little dog, Pooka, (having had too much cheese earlier in the day) was having all kinds of fun licking everyone’s hands and faces after we had eaten our share!

 

Herb Bunch – …started with sorting some of the dried herbs and labeling things. AFter that we worked on the blossoms from the sweet woodruff plant and talked about coumarin. After the workshop time, Loren got one of the bottles of white wine and we set up a May Wine.

Project Day – (Anja) The whole morning was cooking. Loren made bread. I set up a meat pie, then prepped ham including making ham broth that mostly went into a bean soup for the week and then finished up the May Wine, set up the carrots and thawed the butters.

May Wine – a “traditional” spring wine

…and then we started realizing that no one was here, so put off baking the pie until later, because the two folks who had definitely said they wanted to be here couldn’t make it until well past 5pm. So we did finally have our feast, but in the early evening.  Jeanne got her share, even though she couldn’t join us. 🙂

 

Potluck Menu

• Meat Pie – Anja
• Bread – Loren
• Butters (from stash) Loren and Anja
• Butter – New folks
• Sweet Carrots – New folks
• Devilled Ham – Anja (from ham donated by Jeanne)
• May Wine – Loren and Anja
• Marzipan – Anja & Amor

 

Week of 5/28/17

Early Week – Anja went a little nuts early in the week, trying to get some stuff made for Tryggr’s vigil. Loren brought her some milk Tuesday evening, so that turned into Schizz, of course. …and shortbread on Wednesday.. and a couple of flavored butters and pickled eggs. That all went to the event, leaving early Friday morning along with the House Banner.

Largesse Offerings For the vigil

• 7 plates of shortbread
• 2 dozen pickled eggs
• 2 half-cup garlic butters
• 1 lump of Schizz

Week of 6/3/17

Early Week

A cheese got made on Wednesday and fried up with some sauerkraut on Thursday, which is a dish Anja remembers her grandmother making. We heard back on the Egil’s foods and they mostly got eaten and the quantities were pretty good. We supplied about 20% of the food for 65 or so people and all but a couple of eggs and a plate of shortbread got eaten, and the rest consumed at breakfast the next day.

Cheese and Wine Workshop – … was on Wednesday evening. We made another recipe of Schizz, since that one’s pretty easy and no one had a lot of ambition. We used lemon and regular thyme, basil and chives in this one. The interesting thing was that a red color cooked out of the basil (It’s a purple ruffles basil) that left a slight orange tint in the cheese.

Week of 6/18/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – So the mozzarella experiment got tried. It took awhile to collect the tools, but once we got started it went pretty fast. It didn’t end up with the right texture, though. 😦 It took about 2 hours, start to finish, counting letting the whey cool enough to put it in the fridge. Best guess on the texture probably is that the cheese didn’t get/stay hot enough to stretch and something happened also with the curdling too soon. Bad measurement?

Week of 6/25/17

Herb Bunch – Most of this was during the week rather than workshop time, as garden stuff needs to be done when it’s time. Photos also need to be taken during the week of the garden stuffs as they grow towards harvest.

So thyme, lovage, leeks and parsley were harvested for the pies. Oregano was set aside to dry. Ditto rose petals. Mint liqueur was strained for another time. A bucket was obtained for the new batch of leeks.

Project Day – …began with setting up the lentil pottage that got forgotten Saturday night and then going on to setting up the pies. By noon the gravy was bubbling away and they were almost ready. We were hunting a small pie dish to make a individual one for the lady whose oven we were going to use, but didn’t manage to find one, so ended up with two pies (recipe below) which Loren took off to go do. We all sat and talked while the pies were finishing, then started eating once Loren was back.

We ate until we were all groaningly full and still kept going back for “one more bite”! It was all tasty. Not really all period, but a yummy feast! (pix below the menu) …and then we sortof sat there looking at each other wishing for a bit more room, so took some leftovers home. 🙂

Potluck Menu

1st course

• Cheese balls (from the failed mozz) – Anja
• Pickled eggs – Stella
• Black Olives – Loren
• Vermouth Olives – Jeanne
• Peanut butter pretzel bites – Amy

2nd course

• Chicken, leek and mushroom pie – Anja and Loren
• Beef Stroganoff – Stella
• Salad – Amy
• Bread – Loren
• Butter – Loren
• Lentil Pottage – Anja
• Mustard – Loren and Anja (omgs…on the pretzel bites!)

3rd course

• Lemon pound cake, mini muffins – Kristie
• Almond poppyseed cake – Anja
• Comfits – Leslie

Chicken, Leek and Mushroom Pie recipe – Chicken pie is an old standby especially in English cookery. This is not from a period recipe but made from descriptions.

• 2 deep dish frozen pie shells
• 2 “lid” of pre-made pie crust
• FOR THE FILLING
• 2 lbs cooked chicken meat (measured before cooking)
• 8 oz sliced fresh mushrooms
• 1 lg, 2 small leeks, finely sliced, leaves, scapes and all
• stick butter
• 3 heaping tbsp spelt flour
• 3 cups chicken broth – made from the chicken meat as it cooked with celery & vegetables, and then cooled and degreased.
• Handful chopped lovage
• 1/2 tsp fresh thyme leaves
• 1/2 tsp fresh lemon thyme leaves
• 1 tsp fresh oregano
• 2 garlic scapes
• Salt
• 1 beaten egg for glazing

Makes 2 large 6″/15cm individual pies or combine into one pie using a 1 pint pie dish.

• Dice the cold chicken meat and add to pie shells.
• Add the mushrooms to the pie shells.
• Snip some chives and add to the heap.
• Chop the leeks discarding only dry or brown leaf parts
• strip thyme and oregano from stems, chop lovage.
• Melt butter in a frypan over a medium heat, add the flour and stir well to incorporate all the flour into the butter. You should have a really thick paste. Using a hand whisk, slowly add the chicken stock, whisking all the time until a smooth gravy is created.
• Add the leeks, lovage, oregano and thyme to the sauce.
• Stir well.
• Turn heat down to medium, cover and let simmer 5-10 minutes
• Pour over filling.
• Crimp lid over the top, then poke ventilation holes.
• Smear with beaten egg
• PreHeat the oven to 350°F. Place a heavy cookie sheet or baking stone on the middle shelf.
• Set the pie dish/es onto the heated baking sheet in the oven and bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour, rotating pies 180 degrees at 25 minutes or until the pastry is golden brown and the filling bubbling. If edges begin to burn, cover with foil or edge covers.
• Serve hot or fridge to cool completely if serving cold. Fridge all leftovers.

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Week of 7/2/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – Just a few pix this time from the day and some from Sunday. We tried molding the Schiz recipe.

Project Day – …started with checking on the cheese. It took a good solid whack with Anja’s come-along to get it out of the mold, but we got it, sliced it and later fried and ate it. Anja was carving. Loren made a cord container for Amy and was sanding. Amy headed out early and Anja was online talking Feast with Gogor for quite some time. We’ve got a menu and are starting to find recipes for some of the dishes that we don’t know how to make, yet. We ended the day tasting the strawberry cordial, which didn’t turn out as well as the last. 😦 Well, we’ll get there!

 

Possible Winter Feast Menu 

Day

• Noon – Breads/butters
• 1pm – Lunch – Fried cheese, fried saukraut with black bread
• 2pm – Caviar with caraway rye and hard-boiled eggs
• 3pm – Hot crab
• 4pm – Pickled Herring and add pickles to the breads

5pm – 1^st course

• Borscht for the horde
• Small amount chicken soup
• Breads

6pm – Main course

• Caraway pork roast with brined apples
• Beef stew with root veg and cabbage
• Baked salmon with salted lemons
• Baked fowl (Duck? Goose?)with brandied cherries
• Saffron rice
• Some other veg or kasha

Sweets, afters

• Kolacki
• Plum vareniki or knedliky
• Fruit in Kvass?
• Cookie Rings

Drinkables

• Kvass
• Beer
• Mead
• Mint water
• Tea

Week of 7/9/17

Pea flour in the bread may have been the most exciting part of our week! Green bread…. We did have things going on all week and Isabeau stopped by for a visit.

Pea flour bread – We’d been reading about adding pea or bean flour in period to bread to stretch it, and how it was made, so we decided to try it with a relatively modern recipe to see what the effect was. First we had to make the flour. We had green split peas and ran them in a food processor. Next we had to sift to get the flour. Then we added some to the regular bread recipe. Anja had seen that replacing 1 cup of the bread flour with pea flour was about right. Loren decided to get it wet to start, rather than leaving it dry on the off chance that some of the bigger pieces (divots in the sifted stuff) might stay crunchy if he didn’t.

So Sunday morning, he got the yeast and liquid proofing, then the pea flour went in, then the regular flour and the bacon grease that he uses instead of oil. It sat for a little and then he started the bread maker. He said it seemed “soupy” so he added 3 TBSP of flour.

After the dough ball was “riz'”, Loren laughed as he started the cycle to knead it a little longer. “It hissed! I heard it hiss!” After that it was set in a pan and greased before going into the oven to rise again.

Green bread…. 🙂

Project Day – Amy showed up and we talked about cheese and bread and then got to try some of the pea flour bread. Green????

…and then late in the day….Amy had already headed home…. we made schiz…. this time the experiment was with using powdered spices (thyme (1 tsp) and garlic powder (2 Tbsp). …and it ended up with just Anja working on it since Loren crashed out on the couch for most of the time! We didn’t get the equipment set up right for the mold and it was top-heavy enough to bail out a couple of times, but we finally got it. Anja was going to try making ricotta with the whey, but she was too tired, finally, so it landed in the freezer. The cheese went into the fridge and will be pulled in the morning.

Week of 7/16/17

Mushroom pickle happened and a potluck (oh, the food!) and more pincushions and such. Pickle will be tried next week after it’s had time to steep.

Early Week – The un-molding of the latest incarnation of schiz happened. The leek buckets went home and got watered.

Some other flours got purchased or made, early in the week. Rye and barley are not spendy in the bulk section and oat…well, we had a huge bag of oatmeal that was the 2nd bag of which we’ve eaten 1/3 of the first… 🙂 So flour happened from that on Tuesday night and bread for the Sunday potluck

Cheese and Wine Workshop – The cheese got unmolded on Monday and then put by for the potluck, since we wanted fried cheese again. 🙂 (Moar pix below in the potluck stuff)

Project Day – Kinda started Saturday night as Loren and Anja started cooking. A pea/barley pottage, beef in wine and a root veg stew cooked overnight. The pickled mushrooms got started Sunday morning (although they’re not ready for eating, yet).

One of our Herb Bunch was here when she got back and then got going on the mushrooms after a few minutes. Eventually those were in the fridge and the press of the food prep happened.

Potluck Menu 

1st course

• Oat and wheat bread – Loren
• Butter – Loren
• Garlic butter – (from storage in the freezer from a previous feast)
• Fried Cheese – Anja and Loren – Schiz (made last week), sliced and fried in butter
• Olive plate – Loren – Olives in vermouth, black and green olives
• Stuffed Mushrooms – Jay and Loren – Mushroom caps, cheese
• White wine – (leftovers from cooking)
• Red wine – Courtney
• Burgundy – (leftovers from cooking)

2nd course

• Pease/Barley pottage – Anja – dried peas, pearl barley, caraway, onion, carrots, salt
• Beef in wine – Anja – Angus beef, burgundy, mushrooms, salt, caraway – gravy of butter, rice flour and broth from the beef
• Vegetable Stew – Anja – Turnip, spinach, carrot, rutabaga, celery, onion, lovage, plus misc greens, salt, caraway
• Salad – Amy
• Sekanjabin – Loren and Amy – Mint (harvested and prepped by Anja), Honey (local), vinegar, sugar, ice

3rd course

• Molasses Cookies – Amy
• Comfits

Pickled Mushrooms – We had less than 2 pounds of mushrooms to start, then 8 caps went for stuffing and a lot of stems into the veg and beef, so the recipe was halved. Also dried ginger and whole mace were not obtainable at the time we started this experiment, so we used dried. Horseradish was subbed for the pepper because of Anja’s allergy.

We washed the mushrooms Saturday night and left them to dry a bit, then started them with salt on Sunday morning. They needed to lose liquid. Since we could only run one burner at a time we did the ‘shrooms first, mostly over medium heat, then started the pickle broth which was wine, rather than vinegar. Drawing the liquid took time., at least an hour, maybe 1 1/2 hours. After that they were drained and set onto a towel while the pickle broth was going. Loren sterilized a jar and the mushrooms went in and then the pickle broth. It went in hot because of timing. A turnip got added after the feast, so’s to try that in the wine pickle.

Original Recipe (edited for length)

Pickled Mushrooms – Mar11by Mistress Leoba of Lecelade

TO PICKLE MUSHROOMS
Take your Buttons, clean ym with a spunge & put ym in cold water as you clean ym, then put ym dry in a stewpan & shake a handfull of salt over ym, yn stew ym in their own liquor till they are a little tender; then strain ym from ye liquor & put ym upon a cloath to dry till they are quite cold. Make your pickle before you do your Mushrooms, yt it may be quite cold before you put ym in. The pickle must be made with White-Wine, White-Pepper, quarter’d Nutmeg, a Blade of Mace, & a Race of ginger.

Ingredients

1.5kg mushrooms	1 tsp white pepper corns
500mL white wine	1/4 of a whole nutmeg
approx. 1/2 cup of salt	1/2 tsp mace
1 piece dried ginger

Method

In a mortar and pestle, roughly crush the pepper corns and mace. Using a grater, grate the ginger and the nutmeg (grate a whole nutmeg until you have used a quarter of it).

Put the spices and the wine in a pot and bring to the boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for about 10 minutes, then leave to cool completely.

Wash the mushrooms and remove the stalks.

Put the mushrooms in a heavy bottomed pan, then throw the salt over them. Heat the mushrooms well and cook, stirring frequently, until the mushrooms have coloured and shrunk considerably. A lot of liquid will leach out of them.

Strain the mushrooms, and put on a towel so they can dry and cool.

When both the mushrooms and pickling wine are completely cool, put the mushrooms into a sterilised jar and pour over the pickling liquid. If there is any spice residue, pack this on top. Ensure the mushrooms are completely covered by the liquid.

Keep the jar of mushrooms in a cool, dark place and leave to steep – the longer they steep the better.

Notes

Lady Fettiplace would not have had access to fresh ginger, and if you can find whole dried ginger it’s a revelation. I found some in an Indian grocers and it smells incredible.

Mace and nutmeg come from the same plant, Myrstica fragrans. Nutmeg is the seed in the middle of the fruit, and mace is a lacy membrane that surrounds this seed. Even though they come from the same plant, they have quite different tastes, and you can’t really substitute extra nutmeg for mace.

You will lose a lot of volume from the mushrooms as you are stewing them in the salt. We lost over 600g of weight – at the end of the process, we had 830g of mushrooms after starting out with 1.5kg.

Further Reading

Click on the links below to buy direct from The Book Depository.
Spurling, Hilary (2011). Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book.

Links – After our period, but likely the same recipes.

Week of 7/23/17

Early Week – .…was all about cleaning up, adding wine to the mushroom pickle so that the added turnip was submerged and eating yummy leftovers.

Project Day

We started with Loren making a oat/wheat bread and then trying out the mushroom pickles. They’re pretty good, but stronger than what we expected and the turnip pieces were “meh”.

Edibles

Week of 7/30/17

Early Week – Gudrun and Casey showed up on Tuesday for a visit and we talked feast and food and projects and such, at length. …and Anja sewed, which is surprising, of course. 🙂 They got to try the mushrooms. Casey actually thought they were decent and he hates mushrooms! Texture, apparently.

Gogor and Anja have been consulting about the feast menu for next February (and the date looks like 2/18/18!) They’ve got a pretty good one put together, based on early 1400’s foods from the various Slavic lands.

Herb Bunch – Sorted herbs for drying, mostly thyme and oregano….

The Shallots, garlics and the parsleys are doing well, the leeks are awfully spindly. No clue why. Other veg are coming along. There’s reclaimed celery, carrot, leek and turnip, and radish and carrot from seed. Other herbs got prepped and put away .

Project Day

We spent awhile talking about our winter feast. After we had talked that all through, Anja went in back to set up another round of beef in wine…another trial run for one of the feast dishes.

Week of 8/13/17

Herb Bunch – Early in the week some harvesting got done and then on Saturday we got serious about it. Anja was planning on making some herb and cheese biscuits, so she got a lot of snips and bits for that, plus pulled 2 shallots, one of which got separated into 3 and then replanted. She also harvested the garlics, replanted the small bulbs, thinned the radishes and collected some greens from that. She discovered more bulblets once at the shop, so those went back into the ground Saturday evening.

Garlics

Once we were at the shop, Loren spent some time washing the harvested herbs while Anja and the Herb Bunch sorted, prepped and chopped, ending up with two cups of herbs. We ended up putting one cup into a bread loaf instead of biscuits and the other cupful in with barley for a pottage.

That’s the crumb of the bread with 1 cup of chopped herbs and 1/2 a cup of cheese added. It was delicious!

Pottage and bread herbs

Week of 8/20/17

Cheese and Wine Workshop – Monday 8/14 – We made another batch of schiz, but Anja got distracted at a crucial moment and it didn’t turn out quite like the rest because it got too hot, going up to 110F before adding the rennet. The curd was very tiny, almost like ricotta, but we packed it into molds, re-cooked the whey, *got* some ricotta, and then the rest of the whey became a chowder. Few pix. We’ve taken lots before!

Week of 8/27/17

Herb Bunch – We got our tomatillos planted (No pix, yet….) and harvested more herbs and greens. The harvested stuff all got used on Sunday for the fritters, if we hadn’t set them aside for drying. I’ve put the pix from those here.

Project Day – Of course, it being a potluck day, most of this is cooking!

We started the day with draining the chicken that had been cooking all night. We saved some of the broth aside for papyns and added vegetables to the rest. We cooked parsnip, turnip, cabbage, beans and the radish greens in this for a vegetable pottage.

Loren got a bread going after they left and then we started making the “cake” batters. Now, these aren’t sweet, they’re more like fritters than than what we would think of as a cake. The pix of them getting the bisquik added and getting stirred didn’t turn out. We used bisquik because we had it and it needed to get used up. Normally it would have been just flour. The saffron was put into an 1/2 cup of warm broth while this was going on, to get the color to release, then set aside.

 

The next cake batter was for the cheese cakes.

The Papyn gravy was next on the list, so butter was melted, flour and salt were added (and Anja bemoaned the fact later that she used regular and not rice flour) and the flour cooked, then 1/4 cup of cream shaken with 1/4 cup of water to thin it, and then as it cooked the colored broth went back in and it was whisked until it got to a good consistency, then poured into the gravy warmer.

The eggs were cooked next, poached in the rest of the reserved broth with about 1/4 cup of sour cream added and a little salt and then that went into a crockpot to stay warm.

Loren had to take off on an errand at that point, but Amy showed up, so she and Anja sat and talked in between Anja running into the back for the next step of cookery. Amy worked on her njalbinden. The fritters were next and we had a dozen green herb and about 20 of the cheese.

Loren still wasn’t back, so Amy and Anja started on the food, which didn’t include the bread until later. The herb cakes were interesting, but had a slightly bitter aftertaste that Anja didn’t really like, but the cheese ones were enjoyed by all. You can

see the papyn gravy on the papyns in the little eating bowl. The pink stuff is the pickled ginger, which was really good with the fried cakes. The cookies were Amy’s contribution and we didn’t get to the bread until way later.

Loren got back about 1/2 an hour later and everything was still warm, so he did get his share after he got the bread into the oven. We ate that warm, almost as dessert! …and leftovers the next day!

Menu for Potluck

• Bread & Butter- Loren
• Cooked vegetable stew – Loren and Anja
• Fried herb cakes – Herb Bunch/Anja
• Fried cheese “cakes” – Anja
• Papyns – Loren and Anja
• Pickled ginger – Purchased
• Cookies – Amy
• Vegetable Pottage – Anja, Loren and the Herb Bunch

Anja’s version of Papyns

• 1/2 cup flour
• 1/2 stick of butter
• Several pinches of saffron
• 6 eggs
• Box chicken broth
• 3 tbsp sour cream

To cook:

1. Pour at least 2 inches of the broth (it was our whole box) to very soft boil in a saucepan with a cover.
2. Stir in sour cream and bring up to simmer again.
3. One at a time, break each egg carefully into the broth, being sure not to break the yolk.
4. Allow the eggs to poach just until the yolks have cooked; remove from the water with a slotted spoon and put into a heat-proof bowl.
5. In the saucepan, melt the butter and add the saffron.
6. Add flour, shaking or sifting into hot butter so that it cooks & thickens, but does not brown, stirring constantly (it helps to have an extra hand, Mrs. Weasley’s wand or a prehensile tail for this step!) then begin adding the broth back until you have a smooth, gravy-like sauce.
7. Heat slowly until the color changes as the saffron finishes cooking into the sauce. The color of the sauce needs to be a golden yellow, so adjust the saffron or food coloring as needed. Stir frequently to prevent sticking or scorching.
8. Pour over eggs
9. Season with salt & pepper if desired.

Week of 9-3-17 – Making some progress both on setting up the feast venue and the cookbook.

Week of 9-17-17

We had a not-too-productive week with a bunch of mundane obligations getting in the way, but wound up with a marvelous Coronet tourney day and then a really good potluck. Some of our food experiments are turning out really well and one really didn’t. 🙂

Project Day

….started with Anja and Loren sorting feast gear. Wow, does it get confused! Loren had to go back home after the camera and then they got the broth divided out from the beef and vegetables. (Pix below)

…and the cheese was intact and still good and the pickled cabbage elicited, “Oh, gods…. that’s *good*!” It was nice and crunchy, sour and salty, and spicy too, without being overwhelming! Yummy!

So we ate until stuffed and then divided things up to take home and sat and talked music and history and Coronet and a lot of other things.

Potluck Menu

• Beef soup stew with 2 kinds of dumplings – Loren and Anja
• Chia seed, peanut butter cookies – Stella
• Pickled cabbage – Anja and Loren
• Butter – Loren
• Olives (black and green) – purchased
• Pickled ginger – purchased

Pickled Cabbage – Jar or canned sauerkraut is too “loud” for a lot of people. Anja decided to try pickling some cabbage instead, hoping to get a product that’s more palatable when fried with the cheese. So far, the recipes that we found were all OoP, like this Townsend and Sons one.

So for a recipe that works out to…..

1. Shred your cabbage and tamp it down in layers into a crock, maybe with an onion (apple?) between the layers.
2. Take cider or malt vinegar, a couple of cups, and boil it with ginger, pepper and allspice, then pour it over the cabbage and let sit.

So, no salt? …and I can’t have pepper, and it’s not Czech enough without caraway, so what we did was….

• medium head of cabbage
• 2 onion
• 4 Ball jars
• 8 cups vinegar
• 4 cups water
• 1 cup salt
• 1 ½ cup sugar
• Caraway, Black Mustard Seed, Celery seed, Allspice, Clove (jars), Ginger (jars)

The process for filling the jars with cabbage and onion is in the process pix. The vinegar and the rest got brought to a boil and poured over the cabbage, which was left to sit for half an hour. The jars were banged against the table to get the bubbles out and then filled right to the brim with the broth, so that when the lids were screwed down they ran over a touch.

Dumplings – Nothing is more typically Slavic than dumplings. Everything from pirozki to vareniki to raw potato dumplings are all over the “traditional” food pages. Obviously the potatoes are right out for period foods, but lots of other possibilities are out there. We’re going to try doing some with parsnips at some point, because those are suggested as a possibility for “what did they use before potatoes, ‘coz there had to be something!”

…but we had to start with broth because all the commercial beef broths that we were finding had pepper, so Anja decided to do a potroast/soup. After all the hacky-choppy was done it was left to cook overnight.

Divided and cooled and the broth got separated out Sunday morning, so that the dumplings could be done in the broth. Anja then mixed two doughs, one a standard cheese biscuit dough (from a mix) and the other a plain flour/egg/salt dumpling dough. The egg one worked beautifully. The cheese one…. didn’t …. kinda turned to slime…. maybe gravy or something, but not dumplings…. so the rest of that dough became biscuits.

Egg Dumpling

Take 2 eggs, 1 cup of flour and a little salt. Mix to a stiff dough. Some flour might stay in the bowl, this is ok. Drop by teaspoonfuls into boiling broth (at least 4 inches of broth in the pot) or roll teaspoonfuls into balls between floured hands and then toss them in. Boil 3-5 minutes until done. If any don’t “rise” within a few minutes, use a spoon to get them unstuck from the bottom of the pot. Serve warm, maybe with a little broth in the bottom of the bowl. These were yum…and gnocchi-ish texture.

Cheese Dumpling

The cheese dumplings that didn’t work were made from a biscuit dough mix that called for adding 1/2 cup cheese and 3/4 cup of cold water to a packet that was supposed to make 8 biscuits. Now I’ve made dumplings of biscuit dough before and the dough looked right, but it didn’t work this time for dough, just sortof went to slime, or porridge or….gravy (?) in the pots and it took the broth with it. It had a good flavor, but not what we were trying for.

Week of 9-24-17 – Of course, this week started with cleaning up and putting away the feast dishes!

Project Day – We were still sorting out some projects during the early part of the day and tried some more of the pickled cabbage, which still isn’t too strong, and is nice and crunchy.

Week of 10-1-17

Early Week – We’re still trying to sort out the necessary insurance to rent the hall for our Winter Feast and Amy was working on that on Monday.

Cookery – Tuesday tends to be cooking day for Loren and Anja, since it’s the first day of their weekend. Other than picking and freezing berries for later in the season, they decided to make some more broth, chicken this time, since there are more dumpling recipes to try. After the chicken carcasses were in the crockpot and the berries were put by, Anja started on pickling some onions. She used her own pickle broth, but started the onions by the method he recommends that begins at 1:30 on the video.

Pickling onions – Townsend’s –

Tymberhavene A&S night – Loren pulled out some of the pickled cabbage to hand around to folks. Some of them loved it and some of them turned up their noses at cabbage of any type. 🙂

Project Day – Anja started in on a list of Polish medieval recipes, so’s to have them. She and Gogor talked about some of the recipes online, like Chicken baked with Prunes, (….which sounds odd, but Anja’s had it before, and it’s delicious), or the Polish Hydromel, or Saffron Wafers.

Eventually we started the broth boiling and Loryea and Amy both came in not long after. Amy stayed for some dumplings. They worked, but dumplings are a very plebeian dish and bland, in any case. Later we tried some of the pickled onions. They’re really tasty!

The recipe for two servings of the dumplings is:

• 1 egg
• 1/2-1 cup of semolina flour
• shake salt
• broth

1. Bring the broth to a fast boil.
2. While it’s heating, mix the egg up with the salt, then add the flour by the 1/4 cup until you have a stiff paste. When it sits it will look damp on the surface, but be “grainy” when you pull some out.
3. Using two teaspoons, one to scoop up a measured amount and one to push it off the spoon, drop the dumplings into the boiling broth. After every 4 dumplings, take a long-handled spoon and unstick any that haven’t already floated.
4. When all the dumplings are in, put the lid back on and bright back to a boil, then let sit for a minute or two.
5. Pull one dumpling out and cut in 1/2.
6. If it’s done all the way to the center, use a slotted spoon to lift the rest out of the broth and serve.

Week through 10-8-17 – Anja put together the Dembinska page and the insurance paperwork is in….

Medieval Polish Foods – https://wp.me/p8ngGY-Sm

From 10/9-10/22

We’re still working on the insurance which is proving to be a pain in the tukas…. Some lucet cords happened (site tokens for the feast).

Cookery

10/13 – Anja used her recipe for lentil pottage to make a dish for the evening meal at their shop event and also served some of the pickled cabbage! Apples for pie filling happened on 10/17.

Herbs – A lot of greens were harvested for the potluck frytours, but didn’t get used, because of a time crunch. Those will get used early in this week.

Potluck 10/22 – (no pix? how’d we do *that*!)

Anja set up a beef in wine crockpot on Friday that was fridged until cooked overnight on Saturday. It was blearily flipped at 5am. It cooled in the fridge preparatory to being separated, with the beef sliced and the broth being further prepped into gravy. Apple pies got made and set aside to cool.

We didn’t have as many of the utensils ready as we thought, so things kept running later and later. Sasha and Josh showed up around 2pm and helped. We prepped the herbs for the frytours and Sasha prepped the onions for the pies while Anja did the crusts. Jay showed up at 3pm and Loryea just after, and Amy finally near four. We started on Loryea’s souffle almost right as she walked in, since it wasn’t going to keep. (recipe below). Everyone went out front to chat while Anja finished up the onion pies and gravy and then we feasted! Folks kept going back for 2nds and thirds and more!

Potluck Menu

• Souffle – Loryea
• Peach/Ginger crumble with buckwheat
• Grapes – Jay
• Sliced white cheddar Cheese – Jay
• Breads – Amy (Hawaiian Rolls and Rosemary sourdough)
• Butter – Loren
• Beef in wine – Loren and Anja
• Pickled Cabbage – from before
• Pickled Onions – from before
• Pickled Beets – Jeanne
• Olives – Loren
• Onion pies and gravy from the beef/wine broth

Planned, but didn’t happen.

• Herb frytours – Herb Bunch and Anja
• Laganum – Anja
• Lentil Pottage – From before

Recipes

Souffle

• 7 ggs
• 1/4 tsp cream of tartar
• 1 lg. onion finely chopped
• 3 Tbsp sweet rice flour
• 1 cup grated carrots
• 1/4 tsp. sea salt

1. Saute onion in butter at low heat until well browned.
2. Add carrots and salt
3. Cook until soft.
4. Turn off burner.
5. Separate eggs.
6. Beat egg white with cream of tartar until firm peaks form.
7. Beat egg yolks until lemon colored, add carrot mixture and rice flour.
8. Fold together, carefully.
9. Bake at 350F for 20 minutes in greased quiche dish.

Week of 10-29-17

Early Week – Anja was collecting info on how the foods went over with folks.

It sounds like the onion pies are a winner, and the apple, too! We got most of our dishes back and Anja plans to remind everyone that if you want stuff to take home, bring containers with lids or ziplocs! The cookbook is getting worked on.

Amy is still working on getting the insurance for the hall worked out and we found out on Friday that they’re going to charge us over $200! So, something needs to get worked out.

Project Day – We were trying to find the paperwork for the Garden Club building, which was an unsuccessful hunt. In the evening Gogor and Anja started brain-storming on how to replace the drinkables for the feast, since we can’t do alcohol.

Week of 11/5/17

This week’s big deal was the trials runs on the cheese filling for babovka. We already know that the poppyseed will work (it was tried on kolache for a feast several years ago) but needed to know if the cultured milk cheese (tvarog) would work and then also to try the babovka dough recipe in the bread maker.

Early Week – Gogor found recipes over the weekend for possible subs for the alcohol for the feast.

Cookery

We had been gifted with a pint of cultured buttermilk over last weekend so Anja decided to make tvarog/quark and started culturing the milk Tuesday night. She also set up a bottle of pickled carrots. …by Thursday while the milk had obviously cultured, it wasn’t yet beginning to separate, so Tempus set up a lightbulb and a box to get it a little warmer. Anja added radishes to the carrot pickles and tried one of the carrots….not there, yet. So on Friday the cultured milk was ready and we got the quark made… or tried… it boiled, so it was more like ricotta than quark! More below…. …and we had some of the yummy carrots on Sunday as a snack!

Project Day – …started early. Because of the time change Loren and Anja were at their shop earlier than usual and started a babovka dough going in the breadmaker. Anja set up the tvarog as a filling with candied ginger, golden raisins and honey, and cardamom and nutmeg for spice, after she broke up the ball with a fork. Because of the boiling the texture was odd on the tvarog so she needed to add extra liquid and used honey for that purpose instead of the usual brown sugar. The pans turned out to be at the apartment, so Loren ran back after them in the middle of the afternoon. Anja was working on pictures and making the fillings and such. After he got back the babovki got filled, formed, buttered and spiced and were left to rise. They were baked at home.

…and at the very tail end of the shop day we set up a new vanilla extract to steep.

So, the baking…. that was an experience! The “bun” in the upper right of the pic above in the regular cake pan, baked in 35 minutes at 350. It took an hour for the others to bake and of course Anja pulled one not long after the bun got pulled and served around. When she tipped it out, it was still kinda raw, so she dropped it into the cake pan, raw-side up and stuck it back in. Well, it tasted good, even if it looked awful! …and the sour baked right out of the cheese! Now, these things are a slavic pastry, a bread dough. They’re not all that sweet, but the filling makes up for it and the bread part is tasty, too, even if startling to folks who are used to sweet, buttery doughs.

Annenka Babovka (Poppyseed Ring)

• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
• 1 tsp white sugar

In a glass mixing cup nuke milk in 15 second bursts until warm. Add yeast and sugar, stir until mixed, then pour into breadmaker bowl. Let stand 15 minutes.

• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup butter
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup white sugar

Again, zap in the nuker, this time in 1 minute increments until the butter is melted. Stir well, then add to breadmaker bowl.

• 2 eggs, messed up (don’t need to beat, just get ‘em mixed…)

Add to breadmaker bowl, then one at a time add the next set of ingredients

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 pinch ground mace (two hard shakes from tin)
• 1 pinch ground ginger (1 hard shake from spice jar)
• 4 cups all-purpose flour

1. Set breadmaker to dough cycle and let ‘er rip. Check after the first “rumpus” to make sure the flour is incorporated into the dough, and after the 2^nd to make sure the dough isn’t too wet. (You can add up to 2 tablespoons of flour if it is.)
2. When the dough cycle is finished, cover the bowl and put in the fridge to cool, or if you need to do another batch, place dough in a large lightly buttered bowl and cover. Allow to thoroughly cool, at least 2 hours.

To form the cakes:

• 42 ounces (?) poppyseed filling, tvarog, apricot filling, etc. (1 can filling makes 3)
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted

1. Butter and flour your mini-bundt pans.
2. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and divide in 6.
3. Roll out on floured board like a jellyroll, large and oblong, about 6 x 12 inches.
4. Spread filling over each piece of dough, then roll up each piece (along the long side) and pinch the ends together (the short ends) to form a circle.
5. Press rings down to flatten.
6. Brush or drizzle melted butter on top of the rings, cover and let rise in a warm place for l l/2 hours, or until doubled in size. (Mine only rose 1/3… in 4 hours…)
7. Then preheat oven to 350F.
8. Pour a thin line of honey on the top of the ring, then pour more butter over. Add crushed nuts, if you wish.
9. Bake at 350 degrees F for an hour or until the top is starting to get *really* brown. Check at 50 minutes.
10. Run a knife around both outside and around the center column and tip out onto a plate. Sides should be a gold/orange color, obviously cooked.
11. Let cool and store air-tight.

• Note: You can purchase poppyseed filling and apricot filling. 2 cups of fluffed up Tvarog should be mixed with 1/2 cups of brown sugar (or if your cheese is dry ½ cup honey) and a handful of golden raisins with whatever spices you prefer (I used lots of nutmeg and a little cardamom, plus candied ginger). Other traditional fillings are mak (poppyseed, which recipe I’ll put into another post, cherry (sour pie cherry) and tvarog mixed with dried cherries that have been plumped in rum or brandy.

Week of 11/12/17

Early Week

We had a babovka to finish >>> and we’ve been steadily munching on some of the pickled things we’re made when anyone comes in. 🙂 More ingredients for tvarog got purchased and a few of the shopping lists for the feast got created.

Cookery – Apples for the pie filling got processed Tuesday Night. Candied borage flower and pickled nuts are in Herbs below! New batch of tvarog started Saturday night.

Thursday – Jamie finally came in with the pheasant pelt. The pelt is going to become our “re-feathered bird” for the feast. Jamie got to try some of the babovka and we talked SCA for a couple of hours.

Herb Bunch – The weather is closing in, so we need to concentrate on making things from the herbs that have been collected. Jamie still had borage flowers so those were the first thing on our list. The nuts got done late in the afternoon.

Candied Borage Flowers

How to candy borage flowers

1. Pick early in the day before the sun hits the flowers.
2. Rainy days ok
3. Separate calyx from flower
4. Line upon plate
5. Have dehydrator tray ready (preferable with a screen)
6. Separate an egg and mix the white with 1 Tbsp water. (I usually do two eggs, ‘coz it’s easier to keep the brush full) Put the yolk in the fridge
7. Have a small plate of sugar handy.
8. Holding the stamens in your finger fill the brush with egg white. Put a dab in the white center of the flower base first, then brush out along each petal.
9. Set the flower bottom-down into the plate of sugar and dab the stamens with egg white.
10. Cover with sugar.
11. Pick it up with a fork from underneat, shaking off the excess sugar, then set it on the dehydrator tray.
12. Repeat ad nauseam
13. If you have extra petals or stamens put egg white on the largest piece and set it on the sugar. Brush each extra piece with a little egg white and set on top, then cover with sugar and put the whole lump into the dehydrator.
14. Run the dehydrator until the egg/sugar/flower is completely dry, probably overnight. Let cool for an hour (open) then run for another 4 hours and put them into an air-tight container while still hot.

Note – Yes, this is raw egg white, which has the possibility of food poisoning. This risk is lessened by drying the flowers completely. You can also buy meringue powder to do this with, but you need to make a thick “glue” of it, not thin it all the way out.

Note 2 – In period these would have been dried in or near the fireplace.

Pickled Nuts – This smells wonderful. No clue what it tastes like, yet. Anja has a walnut allergy, so the two nuts were separated and the pecans that she can eat were done first.

Pickled nuts – Anja has done candied nuts for decades, but hasn’t found pickled ones, anywhere, despite remembering eating them as a kid. The only recipes online were either for what she would call “candied nuts” or for green walnuts, so she decided to experiment.

• 2 cup apple cider vinegar
• ¼ cup salt
• 2 cup white sugar
• 2 cups whole walnuts
• ½ cup whole pecans
• Cardamom, cinnamon, chopped nutmeg, whole allspice (no, I didn’t measure)

1. Boil, then turn to simmer.
2. Add pecans. Cook 5. Skim off into jar. Fill with broth.
3. Add walnuts. Cook 10. Skim off into jar. Fill with broth. Wasn’t quite enough broth to cover so added some water and honey. .

Week of 11/19/17 Potluck

Oh, we had another quiet week, with lots of progress on projects, but not a lot to show in the way of pictures and things… We do finally have a stack of waxed food covers again, and we had a *great* potluck! Thanks to all who came …and wow…. Brandon and his family drove over 5 hours to get here! Luckily they had planned to stay the night, locally, rather than braving the weather. They’re hoping to be back for the February Winter Feast.

Early Week – The tvarog got finished, salted and put by Monday afternoon. The whey was saved to use in bread. This batch isn’t nearly as sour as the first one, and while it went over 120, at least once, it never boiled. It has a nice, creamy texture.

Cookery – Mushroom pickle was the next one. (recipe below) which cooked on Monday in the

late afternoon into the evening and then Loren finally got it put away.

We were planning a McGregor’s Revenge pie for the potluck, so early in the week, the rabbit got started thawing in the fridge.

Anja tried the tvarog on rye bread Monday evening. Yum!

Tuesday evening – Once Loren found the cooking utensils that Anja needed, she started cooking. This is what she wrote, later.

By 9pm I was hacky-chopping and had a lot of ingredients laid out on the table, ready to go. By 10:30 the rabbit was going, all but the carrots, and I was about to start the salsa verde, which is a totally non-period food. Now, I can’t eat the stuff, but we had the tomatillos and Tempus and Jeanne like the stuff, so I figured I’d make it and they could do the tasting.

By 11, everything was in that but the peppers and cilantro and that I had to wait on until Loren got back from Newport, and I had most of the prep going for the potted cheese and the butters. I had a bunch of garlics to peel, too. By 1am I was about 1/2 through cooking the bacon for the potted cheese. I finally got that done at about 2:30 and the bacon for the bacon/blue butter was going. I realized at that point that I wasn’t going to be able to get the butters done, since I was missing containers to put ’em in! That’s ok, there was a *lot* done, anyway.

Loren ran in and out at about 1/4 to 3. He got the chilis and cilantro for the salsa, but forgot the carrots for the pie filling! I got things the rest of the way prepped and the crockpots going and then everything just had to cook until 7am. The tomatillos in the salsa were interesting. If you press them with a spoon, they pop… 🙂 So those were put by for finishing on Sunday.

Herb Bunch – …was really fun. We made a red cabbage pickle, then talked herbs and spices that get used in pickling while adding things and setting up new jars.

Later on Saturday the carrots got cooked, added to the pie filling, and gravy made, then the pies were assembled and baked. From the 5 pound bunny we had two pies and 3 boxes of pie filling, but probably only enough broth to make gravy for 1 more pie. We’ll have to use something else.

Project Day

On Saturday the pies got made and baked and Loren used some of the whey for the feast bread along with doing pickles in Herbs Workshop.

The waxed food cover stuff decided to wander away without us, somehow. Anja wanted to get some small ones made, so started cutting fabrics and then hunting a way to do the wax.

The wax got melted and the ironing board, iron and and parchment paper got found. And then Anja started in. About 1/2 an hour later she had sticky fingers and a stack of waxed cloth and things were cooling.

Loren and Anja started filling bowls of munchies and finding the rest of the feast gear and then the folks from up north arrived. Once Amy and Stella were there we pulled out the bread, potted cheese and flavored butter, then set out a pickle tray for folks to try.

Pottage was next, then the Mr. McGregor’s Revenge, then Amy and Stella had to head out before the weather got worse. Later we ate a  beef/vegetable stew that Brandon made.

Eventually we got into the babovka, and it was the tvarog one, all the better! …and the very last was Mary’s lovely home-grown, home-cooked grape juice to sip in appreciation.

We were all stuffed to the gills. Eating over the course of 5 hours made it possible, but only just. Lots of leftovers!

We had a great time talking about just about everything under the sun and Anja got some great feedback on the foods. We compared recipes and critiqued, compared tatts, ditto, even talked a little history and generally just had a great time!

Project Day – Potluck Menu

• Pickles – Cabbage, carrot, mushroom, onions, etc.  (Anja, Loren and Herb Bunch)
• Hawaiian Rolls – Amy
• Bread and butter – Loren, Anja
• Tvarog – Anja, Loren
• Mixed nuts – Amy
• Potted cheese – Anja and Loren
• Lentil pottage – from before
• Mr. MacGregor’s Revenge pie – Anja, Loren
• Beef stew – Brandon and family
• Tvarohový Babovka (cheese babovka) – Anja
• Mini Pecan Pies – Amy
• Grape Juice – Mary

Recipes

Pickled mushrooms

• 3 cups apple cider vinegar
• 1 ½ cups water
• ¾ cup brown sugar
• 1/8 – ¼ cup salt
• 2 Tbsp mustard seed
• 1 Tbsp caraway seed
• 1 medium onion
• ½ pound of fresh sliced mushrooms

1. Start the vinegar, water, sugar and salt in a pot on the stove and bring to a boil, stirring to make sure the sugar dissolves and doesn’t stick.
2. While that’s going grind the mustard and then add the caraway and grind some more.
3. Add to the pot
4. Slice the onion and add that.
5. Add the mushrooms.
6. When it comes back to a boil, turn to low, cover and let simmer until the mushrooms and onions look cooked, 20 minutes to ½ an hour.
7. Put hot into a canning jar and screw the lid down.
8. Loosen the lid every half hour until it’s only warm to the touch, no longer hot, then refrigerate. When cold, tighten the ring down.

 

Anja’s Rabbit Pie (Mr. MacGregor’s Revenge)

Filling Ingredients

• 5 pound rabbit (adjust ingredients accordingly, for a smaller or larger rabbit)
  3 large onions – halved, then sliced crossways
  3 leeks
• 2 parsnips
• and another handful of whatever you have….turnips, rutabagas, spinach, borage leaves….
• 24 oz coined carrots
• ½ pound of bacon.
• Handful salt
• 4 chicken bouillon cubes or 2 chicken ramen packet.
• 4 cups of water
• 1/2 cup good cider vinegar (or dry red wine)

Filling Directions

1. Put all this in a pot (or crock-pot) in order from the bottom up. Bring to a light boil, then drop to a simmer and stir occasionally for an hour or two (crockpot, leave for 4 hours) until the meat begins to come off the bones. This isn’t quite enough liquid to cover the rabbit. That’s ok, don’t add more! That’s part of the reason for the order of the ingredients, and the liquid will cook out of the solids to make more broth. The veggies keep the rabbit from drying out.
2. Pull the meat and strain off the broth (I poured through a colander with the meat in a ceramic bowl and the broth going into a large pyrex cup.) Let cool until you can handle it and de-bone (watch the little spine bones!)
3. Mix the boned meat and the rest of the solids back together to make the filling. The filling can be frozen at this point…. (If you freeze 2 cups together, that’s one pie.) Freeze the broth separately in 1-cup amounts.

Pie Ingredients

•  4-5 frozen deep-dish pie shells (8 inch) plus two refrigerated rolled-up pie crusts OR
• Make enough pie crust (butter or suet crust) for two pies in 9” pie dishes.
• 1 stick butter (1/2 cup)
• About a cup of flour in a sifter or shaker

Pie Directions

1. Lay out two pie shells (Standard frozen deep dish pie shells that are about 8” use three.) and two (3) refrigerated crusts. (Have pint boxes ready for the extra filling. One pint makes one pie. One cup broth, 1/2 stick butter, 1/2 cup flour makes gravy for one. Freeze broth separately.
2. Divide the solids between the shells. Sprinkle well with freshly ground nutmeg and set aside.
3. Melt butter in a heavy-bottom pan and sift flour into it until it begins to thicken. Cook slowly, stirring constantly until it begins to brown. Turn the heat off and then begin pouring the stock into it, still stirring constantly until you have “enough” gravy (about two cups).
4. Pour ½ into each shell, then put on the tops, crimp the sides and pierce the tops liberally.
5. Bake at 375F until the tops are golden-brown (which takes 2-3 hours for our pies, because of the density of the fillings, but can vary with the ovens).

Note – My pies had little leftover liquid to ooze out, YMMV! Put a pan under the pies to catch drippings or they will be well-flavored with smoke.
BTW – I’m told that as chicken has a similar texture to rabbit that this can be done with chicken or gamebird by pretty much the same method. I would change the nutmeg flavoring to dill, however. Also, being me, I would use chicken thighs or quarters rather than a whole bird.
Note 2 – Pies can be made up ahead and fridged or frozen!

Week of 11/26/17
Adiantum A&S – Every other Tuesday in Adiantum is an A&S night. We try to go when we can.

The taste-tasting was pretty good. We had for pickles: red cabbage (not as good) green cabbage (Yums all ’round), mushrooms and onions (too strong for 1 of 6), wine-pickled mushrooms (too loud for 1/2, but rinsed off, were pretty good) pearl onions (if you like ’em at all, you like these) and carrots (yums, again), pickled walnuts. Then there were the two cheeses, potted and tvarog, which everyone loved, unreservedly, and an apricot babovka, ditto, with the reservation that it was dry…which it is, it’s a characteristic, and why it’s usually eaten with coffee.

Cookery – Was mostly holiday stuff this week, but we had a bunch of taste-testing happen all week. Some was at Adiantum A&S (above), some was on Thanksgiving (general yums and “omgs-gimmee” on a bacon and blue cheese butter and a couple were random people wandering through when we were eating and offered them some, which responses were all “Yum! How’d you make those?”

Anja is still working on the cookbook/menu. She and Gogor have mostly figured out what to serve for the feast in place of the alcoholic beverages that had been originally planned.

Loren made a bread loaf that we’ve been eating the last of the tvarog with. After that they set up the back so that marzipan could get started.

She wants 3 pounds of the marzipan stuff…. since she has a 3 pound bag of almonds… and candied ginger… and chocolate morsels…. so you know what candies are happening (and no, not period, other than the marzipan, itself.)

So the first pound happened at 4pm or so and the 1/2 pound that was the 3rd round by 5pm. We ran out of sugar. <sigh> We thought we had an extra 2 pound bag, but if we do, it’s nowhere to be found! Anja ended up in a mess since the box of sugar “blorked” on her… all over her….

…and we went to town on the photos of this, since that last time was in the previous blog.

The “rumpus”

Finishing up.

Week of 12/10/17

Cookery – On Tuesday we set up a rabbit pie to go to the Tymberhavene Potluck on Wednesday.  It got baked at home. Also set up a marzipan to go to the vigil this weekend. Friday night a tvarog got started and Loren managed to pick up some dark rye and barley flours.

The tvarog was looking good by Saturday morning, so it got cooked and hung during the afternoon. It had gotten thoroughly stirred, so was pretty smooth and it took a long while to drip out. Pix are farther down.

Tymberhavene A&S/Potluck – Rabbit Pie

Loren ran down to the shop, grabbed the pie and got it into the oven when he got back. He went up to check on the pie at about 3:50 and didn’t come back with it until 4:40, but the pie was done and we headed out as quickly as we could. …and it was still warm when we got there and it got ‘et!

Herb Bunch, Saturday – …was all on bagging herbs, but then later Anja got the tvarog done.

…and mushrooms…..

Project Day

Mushroom Catsup – This is a product of the 18th century, not period, at least as far as the name. The methods all make sense for a period sauce, though, so we decided to try it after watching yet another Townsend’s video (link below). This was started Saturday evening with two pounds of mushrooms, chopped up, two Tbsp of salt and several bay leaves. It was left to sit overnight and reduced the volume by 1/3 by morning. The crockpot had been full to the lid!

Sunday morning it was stirred and a chopped shallot and spices added: horseradish sauce, cloves, allspice, lemon peel, then 1/4 cup of cider vinegar. It cooked on high in the small crockpot for 1 1/2 hours, then was poured into a cloth, hung to drip until cool, then squeezed. We got 1 1/2 cups of the sauce/broth and enough to fill two shelves in the dehydrator of the leftover mushrooms, which are going to be ground as a “spice” to add to various things.

Some carrots got added to one of the pickles and eventually the fennel got cooked for a supper vegetable.

Week of 12/17/17

So, a lot of cookery went on this week. We have a final menu for the Winter Feast and the last trial run dishes got served on Sunday for the potluck. We’ve done enough of the “alternate grain” breads now to set up a page for those which should start happening this week. Brined apples are going and we have worked out an alternative if they don’t turn out as planned.

Yes, we had a good potluck on Sunday. We may put them off to the later time more often, since it’s easier on everyone’s schedules. Next one is scheduled for 1/21.

Early Week

Loren decided to get a jump on this week’s food things by making a loaf of rye bread Sunday evening after Anja got the report out. It was solid rye, so it didn’t rise the way he expected and was more of a batter than a bread dough…and then it scorched. Anja wanted it for the bread soup, so that was perfect. It had a wonderful flavor and scent. (more on bread soup below….)

On Monday the mushrooms were dry, so they got put away.

Cookery

Test run on pork roasts on Monday. 1 peeled and quartered onion, 2 1/2 pound boneless butt, 1/4 cup caraway, 1/2 cup water, sprinkle well with salt. Crockpot at 4pm on high. Flipped at 6pm. Perfect at 10pm. I mean perfect as in it’s the consistency of butter…. Wow…. Ate a lot of this at the potluck.

On Friday, we made the starter for the brined apples. Pretty simple. 1 cup flour, 1 cup warm water, 1 tsp yeast, mix well. It needed to sit overnight. Saturday morning we harvested mint, thyme, lemon thyme and a few last raspberries to go with the apples. Loren got the apples and mint washed and then Anja assembled the box. She used a Tupperware box because we didn’t have a big enough jar. Next was the broth, which was: 4 tablespoons rye flour, ½ tablespoon salt, ½ cup honey boiled together and left to cool. 2 tablespoons of the starter were added and then the whole poured over the apples. Yes, we used a Tupperware box. That’s not usually recommended. … On Sunday the apples were under pressure and were burped at 11, 2, 3 and….

Herb Bunch was all the brined apples above. …oh, and “ends” of turnips, carrots and sprouted garlics are getting planted in the buckets as we go. We have some greens, but most are being saved for the feast.

Project Day – The shop smelled delicious as we were walking in and that was just from the chicken broth that was going all night. We got it strained and set aside to cool. The brined apples were under pressure, at least a little, but dunno about that starter…. We fed it in the morning and hopefully, that will get it going again.

We decided to put the potluck off until 5pm, so everyone could get back. So, cookery and cleanery <grin> happened during the afternoon. It gave Loren and Anja a little time to get ahead of some of the clean-up at least. Loren started the caraway-rye for the feast at a bit after 2pm.

The chicken stew got the chicken and veg from the broth added to it and then it was set to heat back up. Apple got cooked. It’s a remnant of just one of the apples that went into the brine and a trial run of a dish that has no recipe, just a description of apples cooked with honey and then cream put on top. Then pecans got started…, then the fennel got set up. …and then the broth for the bread soup. At which point first Amy came in and then Stella with Jay. Anja was still working on the bread soup for the first 20 minutes or so, and then afterwards, the fennel, which mostly just needed to stew.

We ate from 5pm to 6:30. 🙂 Stuffed people…. By 7pm Anja and Loren were putting away leftovers. Everyone had headed out.

Potluck Menu

• Caraway Pork Roast – Pork butt, salt, caraway, onion
• Bread/Cheese soup – Chicken broth (celery, herbs, garlics, salt) rye bread crumbs, aged cheddar
• Vegetables stewed with chicken – brussels sprouts (leaves and stem) celery, carrot, turnip, misc herbs, salt, onion, dill
• Bacon blue butter – butter, bacon, blue cheese
• Caraway Rye Bread (didn’t get finished until after the feast)
• Barley Bread
• Apples with honey and cream – (just that)
• Fennel stewed in wine (same as last week)
• Spiced pecans (sugar, egg white, pecans, nutmeg) (didn’t get finished until after the feast) (will put recipe in newsletter next week)
• White cheddar (no pic)
• Mango spears (no pic)
• Lemon pound cake
• Clover rolls (no pic)

Other dishes

Vegetables stewed with chicken – brussels sprouts (leaves and stem) celery, beet tops, carrot, turnip, misc herbs, salt, onion, dill, turnip, parsnip, chicken – This was actually two batches, a bunch of cut-up veg bits from other cookery early in the week, with two chicken breasts added and water to cover, cooked overnight in the crockpot and put by. A 2nd batch which was 3-4 pints of water, 3 chicken breasts and 1/2 a bunch of celery, cooked overnight on Saturday. When the latter was strained on Sunday, the broth went into two quart jars and the “bottom bits” were another cup that got added to the bread soup. The “strainings” got added to the stew with dill and a little too much salt. Two of the chicken breasts were chopped and put by separately, since there was really too much meat for the stew!

Cheese Soup – Loren and Anja watched a Townsend’s video about a cheese soup, made from a bread soup base (in his case, pancotto) and went, “Ooh!”. Bread soups are huge in Central European cookery, so we decided to try this simple one, even if his recipe is 1755. Video is below…. the one problem with is is that the recipe wasn’t given for the bread soup base, so Anja tracked down this recipe (Italian….) https://food52.com/recipes/33081-pancotto-tuscan-bread-soup to give her an idea of where to start, even though she had watched her grandmother making it.

…and we finally tracked down the period recipe that Anja was certain was there. http://www.godecookery.com/goderec/grec15.htm

Ok, 1/2 pound of bread crumbs to 4 cups of broth, a bit of salt and some herbs….then add the grated aged cheddar cheese, just long enough before serving to let it all melt.

Loren made the rye bread Sunday night and grated it on Friday, so to “stale” the crumbs.

Anja made broth from chicken, celery and garlic in a crockpot over Saturday night.

Sunday morning she strained the broth and set it aside to start cooking at about 4:30, after the cheese was grated.

Cheese Rye Bread Soup

• 2 ½ cups rye bread grated to crumbs and dried over a couple of days, at least (this is from loaf above)
• 4 cups chicken broth
• the “bottom bits” from the straining in about 1 cup liquid
• 1 egg yolk
• Small shallot
• Thyme (3 springs)
• Oregano (5 sprigs)
• Basil (1 sprig)
• ½ pound aged cheddar cheese

1. Starting from cold broth, put in soup pot.
2. Whisk in “strainings” (small bits) from what settled when you made the broth.
3. Whisk in egg yolk.
4. Heat to boiling, whisking occasionally.
5. Once it boils, turn to medium and simmer until shallots are no longer crunchy.
6. Add bread crumbs and stirring at least once each minute, let cook until bread is softened and mostly broken up.
7. Divide grated cheese into 4 batches, and add to soup 1 batch at a time, making sure each is stirred and melted before adding the next.
8. Serve immediately or this will “hold” in a crockpot on low for quite some time.
9. Refrigerate leftovers and use within a day or two. Reheat in the microwave.

Week of 12-24-17

This was a very busy week, getting ready for the holidays, but not so much doing on the historical end of things. Mostly it was Loren and Anja keeping some of the cookery going and Anja working out schedules and such on the feast.

If you’re reading this, you’re invited to our House Winter Feast on 2/18! You need to let us know that you want to come, to make sure that we’ve enough food and that you’re on the list. There’s no fee for the event, although we’ll have a donation can out to help with the cost of the hall.

Early Week – …started with cleaning up from the potluck. Loren and Anja finally headed home around 9pm, having finished the spiced nuts, the caraway rye. Burping of the brined apples had to happen several times each day. On Tuesday the box was set in an out-of-the-way spot where we could still reach it.

So, I promised on the nuts.

SLOW COOKER Nutmeg-SUGAR Pecans

Adapted from a Recipe by DrGaellon  “Adapted from a recipe by Stephanie O’Dea. http://bit.ly/bqEd0m

• READY IN:  2hrs 5mins
• SERVES:  12
• YIELD:  3 cups

INGREDIENTS

• cooking spray
• 1 1⁄2cups granulated sugar
• 3tablespoons ground nutmeg
• ½ teaspoon ground mace
• 1⁄8teaspoon  salt
• 1egg white
• 1 1⁄2teaspoons vanilla extract
• 3cups pecans

DIRECTIONS

1. Spray slow cooker liberally with cooking spray.
2. Combine sugar, nutmeg, mace and salt; whisk well and set aside.
3. In a large bowl, whisk egg white and vanilla until frothy.
4. Add nuts and toss to coat thoroughly.
5. Pour in sugar mixture and again toss thoroughly to coat.
6. Pour coated nuts into slow cooker.
7. Cover and cook on high 2 hours, stirring every 20 minutes to prevent burning. (I’m not going to do these on high next time. Every 15 minutes and I still had some scorch!)
8. Lay out a piece of baking parchment.
9. Pour nuts onto parchment, spread out and let cool to room temperature.
10. Store in an airtight container.

Cookery – We were polishing off leftovers in the early part of the week, and a number of people tried the spiced nuts. Anja also found a recipe for pickled cheese, another weird Slavic food, so Loren picked up the ingredients to try it.

Project Day was just Loren and Anja for most of the day and mostly we were cooking. We started with making candied cashews (like the pecans from the recipe above), went on to a recipe of schiz >>> , then Nakladany Hermelin, although it was really Nakladany Brie, because Hermelin cheese is hard to find in the US. As always, we had to adapt the recipe so that Anja can eat it. (below) A few other things got worked on, the Secret Project the most, or maybe Anja trying to work on the schedule for foods for the feast took more time. Stella came in late in the day for a bit and we talked history of fireplaces and firepits.

Nakladany Syr – Pickled cheese isn’t really pickled the way we think of pickles. It’s an altered cheese, soaked in herb-infused oil. This is something that Anja ate in Prague and remembered from her childhood.

Nakladany Hermelin – Pickled Cheese – Nakladany Hermelin or Pickled cheese is popular pub snack that comes with beer. It’s prepared from Hermelín cheese (literally means “ermine”) a Czech version of Camembert cheese. As always there are many different recipes and ingredients. Let’s try a basic homemade pickled cheese. Pickled cheese is served with bread and cold beer. Nakladany hermelin can stay in your fridge for several weeks. (from http://www.czechcuisine.net/nakladany-hermelin-pickled-cheese/ )

Ingredients

• big mason jar
• 6-8 pieces of Camembert like cheese
• 3-4 onions
• 8 cloves of garlic
• peppercorns
• allspice
• bayleaf
• hot peppers (goat horns peppers)
• 1 teaspoon of paprika or chilli
• salt
• oil (sunflower oil)

Directions

1. Slice each cheese in the middle. Slice onion.
2. Cover each cheese slice with paprika (or chilli), minced garlic and salt. Put the slices back together.
3. Put in jar some onion, bayleaf, few peppercorns and allspice, then 2-3 cheeses and hot pepper. Again onion and repeat layers until the jar is filled up.
4. Pour oil in the jar so every ingredient is submerged.
5. Close jar and put in fridge for 3-5 days.
6. Pickled cheese is served with bread and cold beer. Nakladany hermelin can stay in your fridge for several weeks.

Our version, Nakledny syr

Ingredients

• Tupperware cold cuts box
• 2 pound round brie
• 2 onions
• 4 heaping soup spoons of garlic
• 5 dollops horseradish sauce
• 4bayleaf
• 1 Tbsp mixed oregano and basil
• oil (mix of olive and peanut)

Directions

1. Slice cheese in the middle.
2. Slice onion.
3. Cover bottom of box with one onion, bayleaves and garlic and ½ the oregano/basil mix
4. Put garlic in between with caraway
5. Repeat the bottom on the top.
6. Pour in oil so every ingredient is submerged.
7. Put on cover and put in fridge for 3-5 days.

Week of 12/31/17

Oh what a *mess* the holidays make! Lots of yummy food. Lots of icky dishes…. but recipes that worked and folks were able to follow!

Early Week – Sash got to try frying cheese at home. No pix. Amor made rohlicky for his buddies at work and in the process of discussing how they went, Anja realized that he had the “tough cookie” recipe, not the one that she prefers. They got to talk cookies online for a long while Christmas night and then again on Wednesday.

Also, in the course of the talk and looking up and comparing recipes, they ran across wooden molds for this type of cookie. Wooden cookie molds were a big thing in late period Bohemia. They’re a time-saver!

Also, Anja was parceling out the various foods to House members that need to be made up for the feast with due dates…

Cookery – So, schiz happened and spiced nuts, and then flatbreads and fried cheese.

Saturday – Tymberhavene Yule Feast – My bean pottage was a hit and the feast was lovely with onion soup, chicken, ham, meat pies, sweet carrots, a yummy cabbage dish, a selection of breads and cheeses, and cake, apple pie and a delicious custard and blackberry pudding to finish it off with.

Project Day – Loren spent some time getting ready and then started the rye bread. Anja was going to take 1 or 2 portions to try to make flatbread of them.

We did fry one, and it was tasty, hot, but once cold, a little too chewy and a touch greasy…. probably not going to use those at the feast…. not good enough to spend the time.

The rolls that were baked in the oven, though, yummers! More on that is going into next week’s report and below.

Rye bread – Anja wanted to try making blini of bread dough, and we wanted another rye loaf to try and to make crumbs of.

Making dough

The fried one – The verdict was “tasty when warm”

The baked one – The verdict was, “Perfect!”

…and we fried some cheese to go with.

Loren was researching and found some interesting information on these sites.

• http://www.thefreshloaf.com/handbook/rye-flour
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rye_beer

Week or 1/7/18

This week’s been busy, but really more oriented to the Winter Feast rather than our usual largesse, sewing and project things. Anything else was

trying to come up with some new largesse projects and we finally have prezzie pix. …but pickles and more pickles along with a good recipe for holubky and knedliky!

Early Week – Loren and Anja made rye bread rolls (recipe below, as promised) and fried cheese during the early evening Sunday, finishing and eating them as part of their New Year’s celebration.

The Invitation for the Feast is done and starting to be sent around. (…and below!)

The Feast Invitation – Print and pass around, but make sure folks know that we have to have their names on the list!

Cookery – Anja found a source for jiternice (Czech white sausage) and recipes for holoubky (cabbage rolls, both Polish and Czech recipes), and the bread dumplings (to be done in the bread-maker) and even Žabí huby (frog mouth cookies) during the early week. Not sure if they’re feastable at this point. We’re going to try the dumplings for the potluck on the 21st and maybe the holoubky.

• Amy got povidla made for the babovka.
• Stella did a hot pepper pickled cabbage for Loren. 🙂
• The pickles page went up Wednesday Night.
• On Saturday a lot of pickles happened (pix below)

Sewing Time – Saturday – No one showed up so Anja kept going on pickles. Stella dropped by and then grabbed some cabbage from the store for the pickles and brought it.

Herb Bunch – Started with a talk on preservation techniques before electricity. After that we went on to trying some pickles. We did pickled onions during the workshop time, then made pickle broth later in the day and finally set up the bean pickles.

Onion Pickles (…and bean pickle)

Project Day

Loren was cleaning up in the back from Saturday’s pickles. Anja promptly messed it up again! There was some leftover cheese to be fried and also cabbage pickle to be made. Anja is trying to get the old herbs out of the SCA shelves so that more stuff can get shifted back there. Loren spent a long while crunching mustard seeds for the pickles.

Amy was there for awhile and we talked about flour and tomatoes in period while Anja stitched on the blue pouch again.

…and after she left Anja and Loren went back to pickles and discovered our first failed one. It’s a jar that’s been pecked at (and perfectly fine) since they were made back in October, (last time in December) but they had turned a little strange. Probably it’s the opening and closing of the jar. Commercial pickles are way salty and sour compared to what we’re making, so it stands to reason.

We went through the jars and got them put back into the fridge, along with the newer ones. We transferred a few to smaller jars  and got them labeled. …and just ran out of oomph, so the cabbage will have to wait!

Rye Bread Recipe

3 cups rye flour, not packed. 9/8 cups whey, warmed. 1/2 tablespoon (heaping) salt. 2 teaspoons yeast. Pig squeezings to taste, about 1/2 tablespoon in this case. 2 tablespoons sugar and about 1 of molasses. Proof yeast 1/2 an hour with all liquids, sugar and salt, then run through the whole dough cycle. Divide into 6 or 8 pieces and bake on parchment at 350 for about 10 minutes to 15 until there is a distinct color change or until you smell the caraway.

(Anja’s translation of Loren’s odd wording…. “Pig squeezings” = grease saved from cooking bacon.)

New Pages – Pickles Project page is up and running! https://wp.me/p8ngGY-137

Week of 1/14/18

Sorry for the bad picture quality this week. We’re working with a damaged camera and a different set of software. That’s why the pix are darker than usual and rather greyed (or yellowed) out like the Pickle Fridge pic.

So we’re planning more cookery leading to the potluck on Sunday. Feast planning and invites are being accomplished.

Early Week

Cabbage pickle for the feast was the big thing on Monday. Loren got the jars cleaned and then we started in. We ended up with 3 big jars for the feast, and one for us. Next was a beef broth that we needed for holoupky. We made a batch of filling, then a set of the cabbage rolls for ourselves and they turned out really well! I’m glad we finally tracked down a period or arguably period version. There’s quite a bit of left over filling in the freezer, for that.

Cookery – We should have gotten more done this week. We had planned another batch of haloupky, this time with pictures, and some knedliky, but they’re going to have to have their debut next week for the potluck. The problem is that Anja went down sick, which limits what Loren can do, even on breads, although he finally got to some rye rolls on Project Day.

Herb Bunch – …again, cancelled, but there are some pix from earlier in the week of things that we’re growing for the feast.

Project Day – Gudrun checked in and we did some planning for the feast. She’s going to keep the loaner garb from getting out of control. …and we were trying to work out how to get her copy of the invite posted. …and Anja was working on how to do the “Pheasant head” for the subtlety. That might have gotten worked out with texturing as on the right. Sadb also checked in and is planning to be the one in charge of the solar. Her ankle is immensely better!

Loren made a batch of rye rolls, which he brought home to bake and worked on a bone needle.

Week of 1/28/18

Stuff happens. This week was a good example of when things just don’t go the way you expect them to. We got things done, but the potluck… went sideways…

Early Week

Loren started the week with another batch of the rye rolls. The recipe makes 12 at time and one gets destroyed to check doneness, so we need a lot of batches. Anja was still home, sewing, sending out feast invites and working on the cookbook.

Cookery – Thursday was Utopenci, pickled sausage. Sounds odd, but it’s a typical Slavic snack. It got done two ways, one with the larger pieces as in: http://www.czechcookbook.com/pickled-sausage-recipe-utopenci/  …and one with 1 inch (approximately) slices. The shop smelled wonderful! It’s not a difficult recipe (and it’s below)

Project Day Potluck – Anja’s take

This whole day went sideways. Everyone that had told me they had planned on coming, got hold of me either late Saturday or Sunday, saying they weren’t going to make it. So I posted on the Facebook group that it wasn’t happening and Stella and Amy never saw the notice! Loren had to go out right when he would have been baking the cabbage rolls, by the original plan, (part of what threw things so far off) to pick up a set of Corning Ware(TM) that I had purchased so that we’d have enough dishes for the feast. We’re still a little short of crock-pots, but I think we’re getting close to having enough, since we’re going to use steam-pans with lids for some of the dishes. I had put off doing the cabbage rolls and other things and put back the cheese, so we ended up having muffins, pretzel bites, utopenci and eventually the sweet & sour cabbage right at the end of the day. The utopenci was determined to not be sour enough, so I made some changes to the recipe. After everyone left I got the cabbage rolls made, (completely forgot to blanch the leaves!) and we took them home to bake. The leaves were tough because of the lack of blanching and a lot of them tore or cracked.

Week of 1/28/18

Folks are concentrating on our Feast enough that other projects have been put aside, or mostly. Amy made povidla for the Feast.

Early Week – Amy made another batch of povidla.

Project Day – =Anja made the garlic cheese. Later in the afternoon she finished the cookbook except for the Wine-Pickled mushrooms recipe. (Note from 3/20/18. That meant the *rough* version!

Week of 2/4/18

You’d think we hadn’t been working on things this week from the lack of pictures! …but we were. It’s just that most of the things we were doing were cookery and would be repeats….

Our Winter Feast is two weeks from today! Most of the pre-cooking is done and we’re getting equipment together and making the last-minute shopping list.

Regular meetings will be happening all week, but if there’s nobody there but Anja and Loren (as all too often of late….) we’ll probably switch over and do some cooking instead. We’re pretty sure that Monday will be a cheese day, since we have tvarog to do, but it might get put off until Thursday/Friday and we’ll do schiz instead.

Early Week & Cookery – We made a batch of knedliky on Monday that turned out to be perfect. Even the next day they were really tasty, but we forgot to take pix. Loren made the dough in the breadmaker. Now, all we have to do is to figure out whether we’re making ’em fresh or frozen or what for the feast.

During the week Loren finished making the rye rolls for the feast (they’re being frozen) and started on the barley. Once those are done he’ll be doing batches of breads.

Egg dumplings happened Saturday afternoon. Anja made enough for the feast in a couple of hours, which included an hour for freezing on a cookie sheet.

Project Day – Loren went in back to work on the SCA gear shelves, since we need to space to set up feast gear. We took a break mid-afternoon for some pickles: cabbage, sweet and utopenci (sausage)

Week of 2-11-18

Cooking and cooking and cooking…. Feast next Sunday! This is the week that Anja’s camera broke.

Early Week – The babovki that were made at the tail end of the day on Sunday got baked that night and put away in the freezer for the feast. With Anja’s camera having failed that evening there aren’t any pix.

Rye bread happened Monday night and didn’t work right, so that’s either going into bread dumplings or bread soup. No waste! …and oat flour happened.

Tuesday late afternoon into the evening was feast shopping. Loren and Jay went to Cash and Carry, picked up a crockpot, and to Freddie’s. The phone rang and rang at the shop with questions, but we got things resolved.

…and the cherries are the right ones!!!!!

Late Tuesday afternoon a friend stopped at Anja and Loren’s shop and in between phone calls and talking (he’s coming to the feast, too!) she stitched up three more of the kiss-lock pouches.

…and the shopping trip *stuffed* things! The pic is just the vegetables!

Cookery – Wednesday 

• 

  Greens had been harvested during the afternoon: regrown tops from parsnips, onions, turnips and celery, some basil, parsley, oregano, thyme and rosemary and a few carrot and radish tops. These were for the oat pottage.

• Pea flour got made since we didn’t know there was still most of a cupful. Well, that means we have plenty for the bread.
• Loren got a batch of rye rolls done. We had miscounted on how many we had, but this gives us enough.
• A couple of the people from up north offered to make one of the batches of cookies, so a recipe was sent.

• 

  Oat/Leek/Onion/Greens pottage was next and used one of the quarts of beef broth that we had frozen earlier in the month, plus the coarse stuff from the oat flour from Monday. Pretty happy with this soup, a *good* recreation of a late winter pottage! I did leave it a little long before stirring so it’s a tad lumpy, but it tastes pretty good. That was done and boxed up just after midnight.

• Chicken for borscht was next. Lots of hacky-choppy! Loren washed up the very dirty beet greens and stems after I hacked the bulbs loose. Cutting cabbage, onion, beets and beet stems went on for a couple of hours and left very red hands. The stems make a nice crunch in the soup. The chicken tried to cook this entire time. Granted it started partly frozen, but it never boiled! It was finally cooked, and I pulled the pieces and fridged them and added the broth to the crockpot of borscht vegetables and turned that on to cook overnight at around 2am. Wow, we were tired…

Cookery – Thursday

We did get the borscht finished, adding the spices, cooked barley and picked chicken. Tempus had to dig to make room in the freezer. We got a lot of things put away, too, from the very-very-large shopping run and a lot of things washed and set up, but then ran out of time and oomph to finish much other than supper.

Cookery – Friday

Kolach dough for the třešňový kolachky (cherry buns) happened and they got formed, filled and baked in the evening.

Cookery – Saturday

Mak, (poppy-seed filling) andthe cherry filling for babovky got done. I made two batches of the mak and for the 2nd batch of the mak I remembered to put the butter and milk in, first…. Wrong way round takes lots-and-lots-too-much stirring! The cherry filling didn’t have a recipe, so I made it up as I went along and got the sugar amount right on the first try!

Cookery – Sunday

Started with eggs for pickled eggs and a dough for the makovny babovky (poppyseed rings) The eggs took forever to boil! The babovky were formed by 4pm and set aside to rise. The eggs, onion and pickle broth were done around 5pm, but my veg peeler had vanished, so I couldn’t get the beets in. At that point I had to wait for Loren to get back.

Gudrun and I talked on Facebook during the day. She was starting the Shrewsbury cakes.

I picked the crab and dang, it took an *hour* to do two of ’em. Used to be I could do a crab in about 5 minutes. Just as I was finishing that Loren got back and took the detritus out, so it would stop smelling up the shop.

Last of all the babovky went home with us to bake, along with a stack of stuff for the pickle fridge. Next week we feast!

Project Day – …went entirely into feast stuff. Nothing else got worked on at all….

Week of 2/18/18

Big week of cookery for a feast makes for a long post with lots of pix! Most of the regular sections have gotten eaten by Feast prep. ..and yes, like last week, a lot is in first person because I’m the only one writing except for personal blurbs…. Same problems with pix up until Feast Day and at the current time only pix of the dishes during the day and the soup course exist. I’ve put in pix of some of the dishes from previous feasts. We’ll be adding more pix as time goes on, since several other folks took pictures but haven’t gotten ’em to me, yet. The whole feast report, plus the final copy

of the cookbook will appear on this page. https://wp.me/P8ngGY-Hi , but right now, it’s not quite finished! Photos courtesy of Louisa and Amy!

After all the stuff from the feast is put away we’ll be going on with regular meeting nights and times.

 

Early Week – Finding cooking equipment, making sure tablecloths are laundered, packing utensils, finding CD’s and other music, asking folks for help on specific jobs for the feast and “does-anyone-have?”. It takes a lot of time!

Cookery – Monday

Loren did a bread loaf in the afternoon, then set up a kolache dough…or started to and then got sidetracked. He was pulling out the milk from the shopping trip to add it and discovered that one of the jugs was leaking. Oi!

I had gotten the failed rye bread made into crumbs by that point and the beets ready to cook, but still needed a basket that I couldn’t reach to dry the crumbs in and to have the beets rinsed so they could cook in the pickling broth on the heat…and I couldn’t get to the sink.

I got the garlic cheese wrapped properly so it will “hold” until the feast and then got bad news on the caviar. The place I was sourcing it from didn’t tell me until this day that they didn’t have any and wouldn’t until May! That’s really not good business. We might end up replacing that course with pickled herring and the garlic cheese with the rye rolls and maybe the potted cheese, which still needed to be made at that point.

So the beets went into the broth and then the crumbs into the drying basket which is up on the fridge, now. Loren had the dough going. We have a class on Monday nights that dug right into the time when I needed to be forming kolacky, but Loren got the dough together and I filled them after class and we took ’em home to bake. He finished up the pickled eggs while class was going on, and they still needed to go to the pickle fridge, but were fine where they were until morning.

We had two trays of makovny kolacky (poppyseed buns) to bake when we got home, so Loren went upstairs to do that and I worked on more paperwork. Eventually, they were all ziplocked and in the freezer.

Cookery – Tuesday

I got several  “set-ups” done. Those are things like the mushroom & onion for the beef getting prepped into jars, (leaving the cans to form the schiz), the cherry juice for the cherry tea spiced and sugared, rummy cherry batch set up….that kind of thing. Loren did dishes, pulled things down for me and put things away. I got a garlic butter done first, then an herb and onion butter. That one had onion, basil, oregano, thyme and sage. After that I pulled the pickle fridge stuff out of the shop fridge so that Loren could take it home and put it away and I’d have room to put more stuff in!

Next was a recipe of schiz. That’s the Italian cheese I’ve been making that fries up well. I had that heating by 10:30. It takes a long time of cooking to get it right. It takes over an hour of heating, standing, re-heating and draining, then molding the cheese, too. By 1am that was draining and I was making ricotta with what was left in the pot. By 2 the ricotta was draining.

The tvarog took preparation, mostly. It was set over the heater at 2:3am to culture overnight. I also managed to get the whey taken care of and squeezed the schiz one more time before putting it into the fridge.

Cookery – Wednesday

First up was to unmold the schiz and get that put by. Loren went out to get milk for another batch since the heater had turned off and the tvarog wasn’t ready to cook. We discovered that the heater kept flipping the power bar. He scrubbed molds for the schiz and pots and knives so I could cook, while I was setting up the sweet/sour cabbage. That took awhile to cook so I sorted clean stuff and checked on what was where in the fridge. I was still trying to find out whether the lentil pottage that I remembered setting by in the freezer awhile back was still around….but couldn’t dig deep enough. I also chopped the extra red cabbage (mostly the core and about 1/2 cup of other bits to add to the borscht.

At about 7:45 Tempus headed for Corvallis to pick up Jay’s friend. Around 9pm I had gotten the cabbage into the canning jars and was starting the holoubky filling when the breaker flipped! I had turned off the hot plate under the onions, I thought, but it was still plugged in and when I went to cook the barley in the nuker, everything flipped. <sigh> …and that was that for a couple of hours.

So that all got finished by about 1am…..

Cookery – Thursday

I got the tvarog started heating since the culture finally worked. I was sleepy enough that Tempus tended it for me while I got a short nap. Two hours of cooking and the tvarog still wasn’t done! It still wasn’t up to temperature and it took forever to try to get it there, and then it drained for hours. Not quite sure why. This one just didn’t work like the others….

Stella came in and dropped off her mustard for the feast. She’s not going to be able to make it. Tempus had a pea flour bread ready so he headed back to the house with it to bake and check through the freezer.

When we left the shop, late, the cheese was still dripping…wow… so we hung it up and left it overnight. Tempus had done a pea flour bread and a barley bread during the day.

Cookery – Friday

The tvarog was finally done dripping so it went into the fridge right away when we got in, durin the morning. Loren took off to do the last of the feast shopping (I hope it’s done!) around 2pm.

I went into the back and pulled the jam ingredients out and got those done after That was 3 batches of jam from the fruit picked last summer: blackberry, huckleberry and salal. The blackberry got a touch of cinnamon, the huckles stood on their own merits and the salal got ginger, cardamom and nutmeg. …although part of the salal jam took flying lessons when Frankenhand took over to juggle the cook pot…. Luckily it wasn’t a whole lot and I have about 3/4 of a pint.

Loren got back around 6pm, did some cleaning up, started a babovka dough and pork chops for supper. I bustled back and forth sorting things into the totes that we’re going to use on Sunday.

I got the asparagus pickle made and sorted out some things in the fridge so that they were findable. I started to do the raisin wine for the beet, leek and onion salad and discovered that what Loren thought were raisins were dried cherries. Hmm… choice was between figs or dates, so he went to the store…. he had to get the pickled herring, anyway. (…and then we found the raisins on Saturday, but it was too late by then….)

So tvarog and caraway tvarog got put together, then the tvarog filling for kolache and put by. The raisin wine got set up to “cook”. Next was the cherry babovky and the broth. We had to take the babovky home to bake so Loren did those (it took until 4am!) while I worked on some of the lists and the broth was in a slowcooker overnight.

Cookery – Saturday

Getting hit, walking in the door, by a blast of delicious scent from the chicken broth was lovely! I’m glad I set that going overnight. So, first was to strain and set the broth aside to de-grease. Well…. to be honest, the *first* thing was to get some dishes done so that could happen! 🙂 Most was bottled and set with other jars of the same size in a divided box in the fridge.

I got the raisin wine decanted and in the cookpot, and the raisins into the tvarog filling and went to set up the beet, leek and onion salad, which was going to take careful tending so it didn’t go funky. …and then that was done… and then I found out that I forgot the leeks! 🙂 Oi… So that got done.

By then Loren was doing rye bread and setting up one of plain wheat and eggs were boiling. Leslie stopped to drop off some equipment and we chatted for a few and then got going on the gutting of the freezer.

Gudrun and Casey arrived and then Toni stopped by for a bit, dropping off another breadmaker and pot and stuff. Toni got to chat for a bit and then headed home. Gudrun and Casey went to get the pickled herring at Rays’ while Loren set up another kolach dough.

I loaded the ice chests that were to go with us right off the bat. After that we loaded up their car, then loaded down the front of the shop with the various boxes of SCA stuff that will come in a 2nd load (hopefully not a 3rd). They headed out to find supper while Tempus and I finished dealing with hardboiled eggs, kolac and such, then loaded our car. Dang, that takes awhile…

The kolacky still needed to be baked when we got home, so Loren headed upstairs to do that, while I finished up paperwork and sorting out what was where.

In ministerio autem Somnium! Anja, graeca doctrina servus to House Capuchin
Page Created 3/19/18 & published 3/21/18 (C)M. Bartlett
Last updated 3/21/18