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Woke up this morning from one of those cool dreams that are just like a whole book. Usually they're cool for a day and then I realize they're a little too crazy to work in a real book. However, I did come home from the library with an interesting book on prehistoric humans, just in case...
So, Monday. Errand clean and catchup day. If that wasn't enough, we finally just finished Laura Ingalls Wilder's THE LONG WINTER, which I highly recommend. Talk about an epic winter! One of the things that helped them survive when they had no food because they'd just moved in and had no harvest laid by and because the snow stopped the trains from bringing supplies to their stores--was wheat. They had a coffee grinder and every day they ground their own flour to make bread. Do you know how much flour it takes to make a loaf of bread? Do you know how much wheat/flout it takes to feed a family if that's all you've got to eat? Well, it so happens that we have a hand wheat grinder we've never used. And we have wheat. So the girls and I tried it out. Um, I think we need a different wheat grinder, because mostly it just sort of cracked the wheat. We had to run it through three times, and we still mixed it with regular flour so the yeast would have something to react with. But we made bread. A lot of bread!
We also got looking at the other kitchen appliances we haven't used in a long time, and pulled out the noodle maker. So we made our own spaghetti tonight, too, out of half regular flour and half the flour we ground. It was all very tasty, and part of the event was for child entertainment purposes, so it succeeded on multiple levels, but I gotta say this: I don't know how humans survived when they had to do all this, every day. Seriously. It's work enough to grind your own wheat (that likely you grew yourself) and make your own bread and noodles and sew your own clothes from wool you got off the sheep you raised--but to do all that and be watching kids, too?! Seriously. How did the human race survive this long?
So, Monday. Errand clean and catchup day. If that wasn't enough, we finally just finished Laura Ingalls Wilder's THE LONG WINTER, which I highly recommend. Talk about an epic winter! One of the things that helped them survive when they had no food because they'd just moved in and had no harvest laid by and because the snow stopped the trains from bringing supplies to their stores--was wheat. They had a coffee grinder and every day they ground their own flour to make bread. Do you know how much flour it takes to make a loaf of bread? Do you know how much wheat/flout it takes to feed a family if that's all you've got to eat? Well, it so happens that we have a hand wheat grinder we've never used. And we have wheat. So the girls and I tried it out. Um, I think we need a different wheat grinder, because mostly it just sort of cracked the wheat. We had to run it through three times, and we still mixed it with regular flour so the yeast would have something to react with. But we made bread. A lot of bread!
We also got looking at the other kitchen appliances we haven't used in a long time, and pulled out the noodle maker. So we made our own spaghetti tonight, too, out of half regular flour and half the flour we ground. It was all very tasty, and part of the event was for child entertainment purposes, so it succeeded on multiple levels, but I gotta say this: I don't know how humans survived when they had to do all this, every day. Seriously. It's work enough to grind your own wheat (that likely you grew yourself) and make your own bread and noodles and sew your own clothes from wool you got off the sheep you raised--but to do all that and be watching kids, too?! Seriously. How did the human race survive this long?
