a new apprentice

[kareina]

Today has been a delightful day--this morning we moved some rocks so that we will be able to concrete them into the earth cellar wall later. Then I baked some yummy bread rolls filled with a delicious blend of nuts and berries. To do this I first put enough almonds into the food processor to create a layer 2 to 3 almonds thick across the bottom of the processor, and ran it till they were fairly uniformly small pieces. Then I added enough frozen raspberries to cover the almond bits 2 to 3 berries deep and processed that. The result was a crumbly mix of berries and almonds, to which I added a couple of spoonfuls of raspberry jam (store bought, but the "lower sugar than normal" option), and processed again, till I got a thick sherbet-like mostly frozen paste. Then I rolled out bread dough (that I had made yesterday and put into the fridge to rise overnight) into large thin rounds, spread the berries and nuts in a thin layer on that, cut the dough and filling into 12 wedges, rolled up each wedge from the wide end to the point, and then set them on a baking pan to rise and brushed them with butter. I brushed them with butter again at the half way point of baking, and again when they were done. They were delicious, but I think the still frozen blend of nuts and berries was even better, and should be served with Ris à la Malta.

Then, while the bread was baking I used the electric mixer to churn some cream into butter, then took out a pie-crust I had previously frozen and filled it with chopped broccoli, a blend of eggs and the buttermilk from making the butter, and a bit of Parmesan cheese. This was ready to go in when the rolls came out, and while it baked I made a fruit salad.

That left me a half an hour to relax before it was time to start the rest of dinner, which included a spaghetti sauce made from canned tomato, ground walnuts, sunflower seeds, flax seeds, and pistachios, frozen black currants, leek, garlic, and spices, home made egg noodles, and some home made "pizza salad". That last item is, I am told, something that is served at pizza restaurant all over Sweden--it doesn't contain pizza, it is just served with it. The restaurant version contains white cabbage, vinegar, oil, and pepper. This is something I have never been willing to taste, since I hate vinegar. However, lord_kjar was hungry for it, and we happen to have a bit of red cabbage left in the fridge, so we decided to experiment to see if we could get something I would eat that would satisfy his craving. In addition to the thawed, chopped, red cabbage, we combined some lime juice, lemon juice, chili oil, olive oil, white pepper, and black pepper. This made something that pretty much satisfied his craving, I could eat it (it went fine with the pasta sauce), but was still quite different to the stuff available in pizza parlors across Sweden.

The food was pretty much ready just as A & G arrived (I didn't drop the noodles into the boiling water they they got here, since they take only seconds to cook), and we enjoyed a nice and really yummy meal, and gave them the tour of the house, earth cellar, and nearby outbuildings. By which time the other laurel in the shire arrived to pick up his computer which lord_kjar had fixed for him. He has recently taken G on as his apprentice, and had encouraged me to take on A as mine. She and I have been chatting about the possibility on facebook, and she has finally decided to say "yes". So now I have a local apprentice. She is the one who did all of the beautiful tablet weaving on my new dress, my new hood and belt pouch, my sexy Viking cloak in progress (we won't discuss how long it has been "in progress"). I have bought so much trim from her that I have joked that I had crossed the line from "customer" to "patron", so becoming her Laurel was the next logical step.

She and I are discussing making a cloak together as regalia for the "Norrskensbard", since we will be having a contest to select a bard for the northern Nordmark groups at Norrskensfest in November.

It was really fun to have people over--we should do that more often, and I think I will enjoy having a local apprentice.

Comments

[katerit.livejournal.com]

I approve of good food and of bardic cloaks. Congrats on the local apprentice - what I've seen of her work is impressive.

[kareina.livejournal.com]

Thanks! And, yes it is. It seems almost silly to take on an apprentice who is already doing such good work, but then in the SCA not so many people become an apprentice to learn a trade from scratch...