I made cabbage soup today and some peasant bread. It’s kind of like an Italian dipping bread, nice and crusty and dense. Here are the recipes.

Peasant bread

2 C water lukewarm
1 pkg dry yeast
1 T sugar
2 t salt
4 C flour
2 T cornmeal
Melted butter

Combine water, yeast, sugar and salt and mix until dissolved. Stir in flour until blended. Place mixture without kneading in a greased bowl. Cover and let rise for 45 minutes. Grease a baking sheet and sprinkle with cornmeal. Divide dough in two parts shaping into oblong loaves (or round) on sheet. Let rise for 45 minutes. Brush loaves with melted butter and bake at 425 degrees for 10 minutes, then at 375 degrees for 20 minutes.
This is a coarse bread and dense, great with dipping oils.

Spicy cabbage soup

1 lb stew meat
1 pkg garlic peppercorn marinade
1 head cabbage
½ onion
Handful carrots
3 small potatoes
Vegetable soup stock (2 of the dried ones)

Brown meat in olive oil and add ½ packet of seasoning mix. Simmer meat on low for 3 hours stirring occasionally (and adding a bit of water when it gets dry.) Cut up cabbage, potatoes and onion. Add to the pot along with carrots. Add vegetable broth tabs and water to cover the vegetables. Bring to boil and then reduce to med-low stirring until done (about 1 hour.) If you want to make it really spicy add the other half of the marinade mix to the water before it’s done.

After we did school I put Hannah down for a nap and helped Bethany with her lap book. It’s early explorers complete with an astrolabe and burned maps.

We went a little crazy with some of the maps and they were too burned up, so I had to print out more.


These will be rolled up and put on the front cover in loops of ribbon. On the inside cover you have the astrolabe and what Prince Henry instituted to help early sailors.

Info. about Henry on the right. Then the middle opens up to show bios and storied of Dias, Columbus, De Gama, Cabral, Cabot, Magellan, etc.

On the back right will be the stories in a pocket for each explorer. It’s coming along, but it’s a lot of work. I like the reinforcing fact, she has to trace the path of each explorer on the map and has the stories to read about them. We might end up doing a book after every unit. Joel started taking notes on a Greek technology. The guy he picked invented the siphon, water clock (re-invented that), water organ and air pump. He’s called the father of pneumatics, pretty cool Grace wrote her story about whales. She’s hopped off on a bunny trail about whales after watching the movie at the Imax. She has a whale figure, whale book and whale suitcase.

Tomorrow we go to Golden for the candle-light walk, always a treat.

Hannah and Sampson were trading kisses.