Boiled bread

Last night we tried the recipe for Bread in a bag from An Early Meal. It was interesting rather than yummy, but went well with the viking theme.

We made the dough into fist-sized balls, tied them into cloth pieces and boiled them for half an hour. 

Hazelnut treats from An Early Meal

I tried the recipe for hazelnut cookies in An Early Meal. I have already had those made by other people and expected them to be good, which they were. I need to maka a couple of more batches before next weekend, though.

I also made walnut cookies by altering a recipe for walnut meringue cookies using honey and omitting the vanilla. There will be no more batches of those, but I will probably bring the ones I made. Meringue is a diva that requires really clean utensils and a good whipping, and I don't think that I could get a decent result doing that in an iron age kitchen. Substituting honey for sugar made a tasty cookie, but the meringue was somewhat strange, probably due to the water content of the honey. It could probably work in the right proportions, but I'm not really a sweet cook, so my patience for tweaking cookie recipes is small.

Veggie dish

I went to the farmers market a couple of weeks ago and came home with black kale among other things. The next day I tried combining it with (dried) green peas, onions and garlic for a veggie dish not entirely unlikely for a viking setting. I soaked the peas over night and boiled them. Most of the shells came off during the cooking.

I fried onion, garlic and the black kale in butter and added the boiled peas and some salt. The result was good, but I also realized I had made more food than I had aimed for.  

The solution to that was making even more food! I boiled pasta, added it to the pea/kale thing and grated some cheese on top. Lunch for me and two portions in the freezer for later use.