Dinner in Ancient Egypt

I like to include food into what we are learning as much as possible. As I have mentioned before, when we were part of our long standing history co-op, we would end each year with a big feast. Everyone (adults, too) dressed in costumes from the era and we all made a huge amount of food that would be typical of that time period. (We were always so thrilled when we passed the 1400's and could include chocolate, tomatoes, and corn into our menu.) These feasts were wonderful, but did involve the parents spending inordinate amounts of time constructing costumes for our ever growing families. That, I don't really miss. Too many late nights.

I can't replicate the feast aspect of those years, but I can have an evening where we try the foods. This is what we did tonight. This morning we spent reading about ancient Egyptian kitchens, cooking, and food, and this evening some of the children helped me cook.

We had catfish cooked with onions:

Lentils:

(Do you have any idea how difficult it is to take an appetizing photograph of lentils?)

Okra:

(It's supposed to be stewed. I don't care for stewed okra, but love fried okra, so that's what we had. Yes, that's cornmeal. No they didn't have cornmeal. But if they did have cornmeal I'm sure they would've learned that it is the far preferable way to eat okra.)

And G.,L., and Y. made the bread. It was supposed to be decorated with symbols before it was baked, and they managed to do some, but it proved far more challenging than we had thought and some people grew a little frustrated with the process.

(The bread was pretty good even though I had them cut the amount of yeast in half. A 1/2 cup of yeast for 3 cups of flour seemed more than was needed.)

The cookbook (and I use that term loosely) was even more vague than I had originally thought. I did a lot of intuiting. I found the bulk of the meal kind of meh, but my young children who are lovers of bland were quite happy. I wished I had tripled the chili powder or gone the dried red pepper route. Boy, it needed something. It looked alright on the plate, though.

We also used forks to eat and didn't eat with our fingers. That, I just didn't have in me for the evening. If I remember correctly, the food from Ancient Greece was pretty good, so I have that to look forward to next year.