Notre Troisième Repas du Moyen Age... or, Our Third Medieval Meal

Our meal today was one I knew would cause a few raised eyebrows from the kids - new foods, new tastes... something a bit unfamiliar. Our main dish was...

Cabbage stew with dumplings!

Tim, Richelle, Brendan, Nadia and Jonathan loved this particular dish. It is quick and easy to make - and it tasted remarkably similar to creme of broccoli soup. Since we only find broccoli about... once/he year here - at least this term... and broccoli is something I love and often crave when pregnant, this particular taste really hit the spot. Jonathan's absolute delight with the soup pleased and humored us, as he can be a picky eater.

Rebekah and Anna ate it to fill their bellies, but weren't super impressed.

Victoria's bowl is still sitting in the fridge - as she took the minimum number of required bites and insisted that she was no longer hungry. Oh well, win some, lose some! We will try this meal again, but it probably won't be a weakly occurrence... I'm not up to fighting with Victoria that frequently!

The big surprise was what we fixed to go along with the meal...

REAL gingerbread!

This is an old recipe that really could be considered "gingered bread. We saved dried bread crumbs (and also had to go ahead and toast and crumble some bread to make enough - about a loave's worth of crumbs). Then we heated 1/2 cup of honey mixed with 1 tsp of ginger and 1/2 tsp of cinnamon. Once the honey started to bubble, we removed it from the heat, stirred in the bread crumbs and then pressed the mixture into a greased cake pan to harden. Once hard, we dumped it out of the pan and cut it into small squares to eat. This recipe was a hit. It reminded me of a granola bar (Hmmmmm, wonder if we did the same thing with granola, would we end up with our own granola bars?) Tonight, we weren't too hungry for dinner, so some of us took the rest of these squares, cut them into smaller cubes, poured milk over them and ate it like you would cereal - and we found that pretty yummy, too. Now we've got a fun and simple (it also made me think of Rice Krispy Treats!) thing to do with all those leftover bread crumbs that hang around in the bread box or on the cutting board after Anna and Victoria slice bread - I think this is a recipe that is a keeper!

INTERESTING TIDBIT:

The word "lord" comes from the Old English hlaford, which meant "keeper of the bread." "Lady" comes from hlaefdigge, which meant "kneader of the dough" (from p. 45 in Days of Knights and Damsels).