Thursday, May 30, 2013

Green soup

I am planning on making a soup from chopped green leaves since they are one of the few fresh vegetables around here this time of year. I meant to pick nettles, but will have to substitute buyable greens. Apart from spinach there will be parsley and rocket in the soup I think.

The soup will be simple, just greens, stock and cream.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Flatbread

I tried a simple flatbread recipe yesterday.

300 ml flour
125 ml water
a pinch of salt

I combined several different flours and kneaded a dough, and made 8 flat cakes which I cooked on a frying pan with no grease. They were a bit on the thick side, but the proportions of the dough works.


Thursday, May 23, 2013

On numbers

It is less than two weeks to the Majgreve event and the deadline for registering was last Sunday. The number of attendees still seems to be a bit uncertain although we are soming to some sort of decent approximation. There was a group meeting on Monday and the progress report from the event staff group made a surprisingly large amount of people remember that they had intended to come.

I have prepared some stuff in advance although there was some uncertainty, but might need to add a dish to the feast, or do some other late tweaking. It is a good thing that the store is close to the site.


Saturday, May 18, 2013

Pork belly

A longhouse calls for pork, right? This is a test run of a piece of pork belly boiled, sliced, glazed and fried. I plan to do the boiling and slicing at home and the rest on site.

I used the following for the test:

500 g salted pork belly
500 ml water
2 tsp salt
50 ml elderflower cordial
1 tsp rosemary
1 tsp mustard powder

And then I glazed it with:

1 tbsp honey
1 tsp malt vinegar
0,5 tsp mustard
a little fresh horseradish
salt

I am a bit unsure about the use of rosemary for Viking age and might use some other herb the next time. For the real deal I will probably also put more salt and spices in the cooking water since the meat itself could have been spicier. All in all it was rather good, though.


Wednesday, May 15, 2013

After Double Wars

Most things went well, the weather was good and there were lots of nice people, as usual,

Here are some random notes, mainly for me:


  • Inner walls/dividers for the tent would be nice to replace.
  • The heater needs a good cleaning and possibly different fuel. 
  • The heater was nice, but not really necessary. 
  • Kitchen chest can lose some stuff, and the cutting board should be on top, not under everything else.
  • If we make a bed it might be nice to add some sort of shelf for small stuff, phone, water bottle, etc.
  • Having two sheep skins in bed is nice.
  • We brought way too much food. 
  • Soup, bread and dried meat is a decent lunch.
  • Use sunscreen when packing.
  • Bring a larger container for water.
  • I really need to finish the Mästermyr chest.
  • Cushions for the benches would be nice. 

Dried meat

Náttfari and I both like beef jerky. He likes his chili-hot, I can do with less heat. We are prepping some meat for bringing to Double Wars. The first batch is drying on low heat (ca 75 degrees C) in the oven now. It was about 1 kg before trimming off fat and stuff. It was soaked for almost 24 hours in:

75 ml sea salt
75 ml cane sugar
75 ml white balsamic vinegar
0,5 tbsp black pepper
0,5 tbsp long pepper
2 cloves of garlic
2 tsp ground dried onion

First tasting suggests that using less salt or pickling it for a shorter time might be better. There is also probably no such things as to much garlic, so I could have used more. The recipe was an adaption of this recipe found at Foodily.



Wednesday, May 1, 2013

New old tent

We bought a used tent a couple of months ago and tried assembling it today. It went well and I look forward to using it at Double Wars.