Little House Cooking: from the archives

I am going to admit something here…
It may be such a shock you might have to sit down.
I, a homeschooling mother of four…

I have never read all the Little House on the Prairie Books!

Gasp!

Tis’ true, tis’ true.
I began reading the set to the children sometime last year and have been in total love with them ever since. I am so sad that I didn’t read them as a young girl because, they are incredible.
I LOVE every minute of our time reading together.
One consolation of not having read them myself is that, I am equally excited to see what is going to happen next and when I get the,
“Please Moma, one more chapter…” it is soooo easy to say “YES!”
We are coming to the close of The Long Winter and it is all to appropriate being that this has been the coldest winter we have had in a very long while. So during our days of schooling I spend time curled up with my four beloveds and we embark on Laura’s journey where days are full of blizzards, brown bread and potatoes with salt.
Today I had an idea to engage my children.
As soon as we finished reading today’s chapters, the children and I set out to making our own
Brown Bread.

I own a copy of The Little House Cookbook and it is filled with recipes just like Ma Ingalls made.
For example…

“I wish you’d help me, anyway, Charles,” Ma said. She took the coffee mill from Mary and emptied the ground wheat from its little drawer. She filled the small hopper with kernels and handed the mill to Pa. “I’ll need another grinding to make the bread for dinner, ” she told him.

Ma took the covered dish of souring from its warm place under the stove. She stirred it briskl, then measured two cupfuls into a pan, added salt and saleratus, and the flour that Mary and Carrie had ground. Then she took the mill from Pa and added the flour he had made.

The Long Winter

The recipe calls for

2 1/2 cups white all purpose flour

1 cup Sour-dough starter

several slices dried bread

1 lb. wheat berries

2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. drippings

Abram feeling awfully proud of our “Brown Bread”

And then we made some cinnamon rolls as well. I feel certain that in the midst of the huge list of food that Almanzo ate during the course of Farmer Boy, that this food was mentioned. But when I went back to scan, I didn’t find it. Nevertheless, I feel SURE that if it was there, that boy would have eaten it.