Things That Have Come Before

I do have another blog. That is where I post about my daily life, my writing and where I rant about the injustices of the world and sulk at the pain and sufferings inflicted upon me. So naturally, it’s on LiveJournal.

I decided to start this separate diary to give it a more professional/academic feel (while trying to be up-front about the fact that it is neither). To have all of these experiments and experiences available in one place without having to sort through the LOLcats and cute pictures of the family, though I may still sneak those in.

But I did write several articles in that other blog about growing wheat and bread making before deciding to split that subject off on its own. In the interest of completeness (and so I don’t have to re-write those articles) here are links to them.

• It begins on a cruise....

I went back and read all of my blog entries from the Alaskan Cruise the family and I took in August of 2008, and even though my next entry refers to a decision being made on that cruise and it being discussed in the cruise diary, I don’t see it. I do remember deciding on that cruise, that there were a number of things that intrigued me about medieval food, and that I wanted to investigate them.

• In a long post about goals (dated Aug. 12, 2008)

I list one of my long-term goals as:

I want to work on this medieval peasant cooking project I mentioned in my cruise blog. It will consist of trying to make for myself a number of medieval meals, not the good tasting ones that appear in the cookbooks of the times, but rather the subsistance foods that the common person would have eaten. I see this as something I dabble with for a long time, with large gaps between experiments, but I get to combine my interest in medieval life and cooking.

• Medieval Cooking This one has some good comments from my friends

• Two Paragraphs in a much larger post dated Sept. 11, 2008 The relevant bits quoted here:

Medieval Cooking: I cooked some barley much like I did the Wheat Berries and it turned out equally well. The barley is more suited (at least to my palette) for just eating boiled and puffs up and gets starchy much like rice does (though the process take 3 times as long). Reheating it on the third day I forgot it on the stove and burnt the hell out of it.

Medieval Cooking, part 2: Last weekend (I think) I took some leftover, uncooked Wheat Berries and through them into a planter that I had just emptied of all the grass that had been growing in it. Just to see what would happen with no real expectations. Yesterday, I noticed green grass-like sprouts growing in it, and figured it was just the grass that I had not cleared out entirely. On poking around however, the green shoots were definitely coming from the little white seeds I had thrown in. I have successfully planted wheat!

• Medieval Cooking Experiment #3

• Medieval Cooking Episode #4