bunnyjadwiga

http://www.rtbi-online.org/feast.htm

Note that if you kindly volunteered to help, there will be NO CHARGE for the food (though you might end up eating in the back room!

Yeah, it's pricey, though in line with the regular fundraiser costs in our area of North Jersey. I guarantee attendees will get value for their money, and take home some doggie bags. :)

Brighid ni Charain who translated de Nola's Libro de Coch in the Florilegium has been asked to come and plans to be there to speak.

Last sunday, I got a taste for pork with dried fruit. And there was this crockpot.

So I split a pork loin into 2 roasts, and put one in the crockpot with dried fruit and wine and all kinds of spice and some carrots... and it was good, but I didn't write down the recipe. On the other hand, on Tuesday I did something similar with Chicken Thighs and I *am* writing it down:

4 skinned and defatted chicken thighs, bone-in.
4 carrots, peeled and cut into coins
4 cloves of garlic, chopped up
about 8-10 rounds of dried apple, snipped up to 1" size
5-6 dried apricots, cut up small
4 dates, pits removed, chopped very small
about 1/4 cup of raisins
Liquid: equal parts prune juice* and white wine
1 very heaping tablespoon of jarred mincemeat mixture**
Onion Salt***
Shallot pepper ****
Cassia cinnamon, ginger, 1 blade mace,

Cook on high for 4 hours or until you remember to eat it.

*We got this prune juice for Beekman a while ago, but he wouldn't have anything do with it, and it's sitting in the fridge. Did you know prune juice is not made by juicing prune plums, but by water extraction of dried prunes (prune plums)?
** I got this at a discount place a while ago, and it is handy for certain types of cooking. I haven't made a pie with it, but we did make a chutney with it a while ago, which is why we have an open jar in the fridge.
*** we were out of onions
**** there was about a smidge left in our Penzey's container. time for a Penzey's order! Wee-HA!

We served this with the leftovers of a Millet-Quinoa dish (from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven) that is so quintessentially vegetarian-cuisine that you expect it to spontaneously manifest a garnish of alfalfa sprouts... we made a little much of it and it just doesn't go with everything.

From "Experience and Children's Eating Behavior," Birch & Fisher.

Our group investigated the effects of repeated exposure to new foods on children's preferences for these foods and found that with repeated expsure, many new foods that children initially rejected were accepted (Birch & Marlin, 1982). However acceptance does not come immediately but make take 8-10 exposures and must involve tasting the food; looking at and smelling it are not sufficient to induce increased acceptance (Birch, McPhee, Shoba, Pirok, & Steinburg, 1987). Unfortunately, parents do not often appreciate that a child's initial rejection of a new food (a) is normal, (b) reflects an adaptive process, and (c) may be followed by increased acceptance of the food after the child has repeated opportunities to eat it. The commonly held view is that the child's initial rejection of a food reflects a fixed, immutable dislike for the food. As a result, the child may be viewed as finicky, and the new food may not be offered to the child again, eliminating any opportunity for the child to learn to like the food. The child's neophobia plays a central role in early food acceptance. The fact that early and repeated opportunities to eat new foods can change initial rejection to acceptance underscores the critical role of parents in selecting the array of foods offered to their children.

Our group recently investigated infants' responses to their first solid foods and whether their acceptance of new foods was enhanced with repeated exposure (Sullivan & Birch, 1994). Infants 4-6 months old were fed a novel vegetable on 10 occasions, several times each week by their mothers, and intake of the vegetable was measured before, during and after their opportunities to each the food. Infants were videotapes while eating, and adults rated the videotapes for the infants' acceptance of the foods. Over the exposure series, infants showed dramatic increases in intake of the vegetables, doubling their intake from about 30 g to about 60 g. An unanticipated result was that the results differed for formula-fed and breast-fed infants; increases in intake were most dramatic in the breast-fed infants. We hypothesize that this greater acceptance of a novel food by breast-fed infants is due to their greater experience with a variety of flavors, which pass from the maternal diet into breast milk. Recent research reveals that flavors ingested by mothers are present in breast milk and that infants respond systematically to these flavors (Mennella & Beauchamp, 1991a, 1991b). Research with animal models has shown that young animals who experience dietary variety show much more ready acceptance of novel diets than do animals whose dietary experience is limited to a single diet (Capretta, Petersik, & Stewart, 1975)."

- From Why We Eat What We Eat: The Psychology of Eating, Elizabeth D. Capaldi, ed. (Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 1996), p. 132-133

My co-worker alerted me to a sidebar in a article in New Scientist, which claimed

• Location division in apple allergies: "People in northern and central Europe are more likely to be allergic to uncooked apple flesh, while an allergy to apple skin is more common in southern Europe."
  
• "Iceland is a hotspot for fish allergies."
  
• "Switzerland is a hotspot for celeriac allergies."
  
• "The Mediterranean is a hotspot for peach allergy."
  

(source: Andrew Watson, "If the Nuts Don't Get You, The Apple Will," New Scientist, 1 August 2009, p. 28-31.)

-per Jaella, I already know that Finns have a disproportionate amount of lactose intolerance.

Stumbled across this article by Kirrily Robert:
http://katrowberd.elizabethangeek.com/articles/veg-cooking.mhtml

I especially like the charts of 2 menus with period food and of a number of period vegetarian dishes. Go, read, eat! It almost makes me want to think about food.

This was one of the things I put on the St. Luke's dayboard-- it's one of my never-fail recipes-- but I didn't have it in the documentation. It makes a nice cookie dip or fruit dip, and if you use 'potcheese' (soft cheese) rather than ricotta, or keep it really cold, it also makes a nice spread.

Food for Angels
From the Libro de Sent Sovi, translated in Santich, Barbara, The Original Mediterranean Cuisine (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1995)

Angel's Food
If you want to eat the fresh curds, put the curds in the mortar and pound with some good white sugar. And when pounded together, blend in some rosewater or orangeflower water, and put it in bowls or dishes or whatever you like; and serve it at table... And you can do the same with fresh cheese, which is better, and it is called angel's food.

2 lb container ricotta cheese
several tsps orangeflower water
sugar to taste

I was in a hurry, and the ricotta I had was some my mom had in the freezer, so it was broken in curd. However, for a sweet dish, I had the perfect helper on hand-- a teenage girl. I had her dump the ricotta in a bowl and mix it. I added several generous splashes of orangeflower water -- I use that more often than rosewater because some people have an automatic rosewater=soap reaction; someone once said "I feel like I'm eating face cream"...
Then I handed her the box of sugar and said, "This dish is called food for angels. Keep stirring in sugar and tasting it until it tastes like food for angels.
I believe everyone in the kitchen tried it at some point, and it was nummy.

Also, you can substitute splenda for the sugar if you want. :)

At the end of the dayboard, I checked the kitchen and, shocked, went out and sat down next to Olwyn.
"We're definitely not in Kansas anymore, Olwyn."
"Yes, but?"
"They didn't eat all the boiled garlic."

( The event and the dayboard went great. More info later.)

So, we have two heads of cabbage at home, and Sarah is urging me to palm one of them off on St. Luke's.
Last night I made braised cabbage in the style of buttered worts, and that was pretty good; should I go with that, or this recipe:

Caboches In Potage. IIII. Take Caboches and quarter hem and seeth hem in gode broth with Oynouns y mynced and the whyte of Lekes y slyt and corue smale and do þer to safroun an salt and force it with powdour douce.-- Forme of Cury

The wierd things you find on the Weather Channel page!
http://climate.weather.com/articles/organicfood.html?page=1
Includes lists of fruit and veg most likely to contain pesticide residue, and the ones least likely to.

I'm thinking of putting together a list of "easy to make medieval dishes" and I thought I'd start where I started, with Armored Turnips. For those who aren't familiar with them, they are a sort of turnip au gratin, or as some people have put it, turnips as cheese substrate.

Platina book 8
Cut up turnips that have been either boiled or cooked under the ashes.
Likewise do the same with rich cheese, not too ripe. These should be
smaller morsels than the turnips, though. In a pan greased with butter
or liquamen, make a layer of cheese first, then a layer of turnips,
and so on, all the while pouring in spice and some butter, from
time to time. This dish is quickly cooked and should be eaten quickly, too.

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