What I did this weekend

[bunnyjadwiga]

So, I was supposed to be working on my period treatise, and on cleaning my house. So what did I want to do? Cook, of course. I was dying for some spinach so I went to Valley Farm market and picked up some Turnip greens for the greens recipe, and also some bacon for the pease porridge, and black grapes for black grape sauce (to make and freeze for the Emmaus Fair.

The peas, a 59 cent bag of split peas I'd gotten tired of moving around the house and started boiling, were really a struggle. I was trying to use Le Menagier's recipe for Old Peas:

nd first a SOUP of OLD PEAS. It is appropriate to shell them, and to find out from the people the place the nature of the peas of the area (for commonly peas do not cook well in well-water: and in other places they cook well in spring-water and in river water, as in Paris, and in other places, they do not cook at all in spring-water, as at Besiers) and this known, it is appropriate to wash them in a pan with warm water, then put in a pot with warm water on the fire, and boil them until they burst. Then separate the liquid from the solid, and put the liquid aside, then fill the pea-pot with warm water and put on the fire and separate a second time, if you wish to have more liquid: and then put back without water, for they will produce enough. and boil in it; and it is not appropriate to put the spoon in the pot after the separating, but shake the pot and the peas together, and little by little feed them with warm water or a little more than warm but no cold, and boil and cook completely before you add anything except hot water, be it meat or anything else: do not add salt, nor bacon, nor absolutely anything whatsoever until they are fully cooked. You can add bacon water or meat stock, but you must not add any salt, nor even the tip of the spoon, until they are well cooked; you can always stir them by moving the whole pot.

On meat days, you should, after the separating, add water from bacon and from meat, and when it is almost cooked, you can put bacon in; and when you remove the bacon from these peas, you must wash it with meat-stock, so that it looks nicer to put in slices on the meat and so that it does not appear to have peas stuck to it.

I kept trying to boil them on low, but I think I cooked them on too low a heat and left them in the iron pot for too long, it took two or three different batches of boiling to make them explode, and I kept having to stir them, which ruined the broth thing. Then I didn't boil my bacon, but put it right in. Even with pepper and salt added, it tasted odd, though palatable.

Saturday night at Alphageek's, we filmed me doing a demo of how to make mustards (the Rumpolt german one, the Welserin pear mustard, a lombard mustard, and Viviender's cinnamon mustard. Then I made the black grape sauce and some dried plum sauce.

I got started on the mustard for next weekend but the red grapes didn't get completely boiled down yet.