King Aidyn and the Feast of the Round Table

To get our appetites in the spirit of the Middle Ages, I cooked up an elaborate (for a peasant!) dinner.

 Here's what was on the menu and how to cook it yourself:


Herb-roasted chicken drumsticks and potatoes

(I usually don't post recipes so excuse my boorish undeveloped directions)

1. Make a bed of onion shreds on the bottom of a glass pan. I simply cut an onion in thick slices and tore it to pieces with my hands.

2. Rinse chicken and dump in a bowl big enough to stir them around in. Add drizzles of olive oil and sprinkle herbs (fresh is best, but I used dried). We used rubbed sage, parsley, poultry seasoning, rosemary leaves, basil leaves, ground sage, and pepper. Mix it up so every piece is spreckled with herbs. Place on top of onion bed.

3. Peel and quarter potatoes and add to bowl big enough to stir them around in. Add drizzles of olive oil and rosemary leaves, pepper, salt, and whole cloves of garlic. Squeeze in potatoes wherever they'll fit in the glass pan.

4. Cook at 400 degrees for 1 hour and 10 minutes. Baste with juices every 15 minutes.

Pottage

Pottage (or potage) was a continuously cooking meal, often eaten by peasants. They would add vegetables, grains, beans, roots, practically anything to the pot and cook it for weeks, taking some out to eat and always adding more in.

Therefore you can throw anything you want into it.

I used the crockpot because it has the tendency to completely annihilate anything I put into it, making it a sludgy, tender mess, which is what you want to go for with pottage.

We used:
cabbage (torn into chunks with my hands)
grilled onions (grilled on stovetop first, added to pot next)
split peas
carrots
herbs (as listed above)

Grapes and dark rye bread

We also had grapes and dark rye bread on hand.

No utensils allowed!

To get the full experience, we used no utensils, just our lovely hands. Chicken bones made excellent spoons for stirring pottage. We talked about how, during the Middle Ages, it was considered effeminate for men to use utensils (other than a knife) and that Charles V declared that a fork could be used only when the thing to be consumed could stain the fingers.

It was a jolly mess. We got into character, and Aidyn remarked that "this is a good day!"

In other news...

 We've been working on our castle replica. It's still in the messy, what-the-hell-are-you-making stage, but it's coming along.

Aidyn's also been working on his -an words. I chose -an words for Fantasyland due to Peter Pan, but some other characters snuck onto the list as well.

Oh, I love the personalization of homeschooling.