Colonial Boston Dinner- Well, Sort Of!

One of the home shooling thoughts for me was cooking our way through history. I let life get in the way, but Wyatt and I decided to go back and try it from Colonial times anyhow. So Saturday, we set out on our first adventure.

In the interest of getting through recipes which required hour hours of cooking before Charlie was ready to fall asleep, I let Wyatt use the mixer on the bread, which we began at 1:20 in the afternoon.

Wyatt made the Boston Brown Bread. He caught his sister glancing over, but not reading the history in the cookbook and called her out on it. I hadn't actually given her that instruction. Wyatt isn't exactly fond of raisins, so he wasn't too thrilled with making something that already had a strike against it! 

Also, we didn't have coffee cans to bake the bread in, so we used a metal loaf pan with really high sides in the water bath in the dutch oven.

Here is the roasting pan we used the way a dutch oven would be used, it was just a different shape to accommodate the pan...

Here it is with the pan in it.

 Here are the beans. The kids really tag teamed on this part. They boiled  the beans and bacon for over an hour and a half, before the other items were added and it was put it he oven. Good thing wood was plentiful during colonial times, as otherwise things would have taken a great deal of fuel!

The brown bread when it came out from cooking.

And once it was turned out on the plate.It is very dense, and you can easily taste the course grains. We all tried it, it seemed best with butter to offset the dense and dry nature of the bread.

And the Boston Baked Beans were also a hit.

If Recipes Came with Warnings...

I got a magazine in the mail the other day. I don't often have much time for reading them, so was feeling a little guilty about that, and started to page through this one while waiting to have my blood drawn the other day.  A couple recipes caught my eye, including this one.

The recipe itself looked really cute, chocolate mouse in ice cream cones, dipped in chocolate and topped with almonds. But the recipe had a lot of crazy stuff in it, so I thought I could get by with a few substitutions. I figured I could buy some cute little ice cream cones, fill them with french silk made with simple pure ingredients, then dip in chocolate and top with almonds. Sounds simple enough, right?

I took time for extra refrigeration of the cones with the french silk before I dipped them in chocolate, as french silk can be quite touchy that way.  Wyatt was finishing some math, and getting pretty excited for dessert.  So I melted the chocolate and got going on dipping, which was a little too mess, and therefore I resorted to painting the chocolate on with a spatula and sprinkling the almonds on top.

I thought things would be fine, when I tried to return them to the fridge to harden more.

There was a crash, several fell out of the tray into the fridge, a few crashed on the floor.

Wyatt jumped up to stop Shadow from heading toward chocolate and helped me clean up the mess, securing the remaining for dessert.  

The ones I grabbed on the way down, came out rather lopsided.

Wyatt looked at me trying to decide what to do and said,

"It's a good thing recipes don't come with warnings, or people would never try them."

We both got a pretty good giggle. For someone who dislikes writing so, he has some pretty good one-liners! Had I known the outcome, I still would have played with this fun little recipe.  But there have been a few experimental recipes that might not have happened over the years.

So if you had realized things wouldn't turn out like the photo, is there anything you would not have tried?