er, I mean, kitchen.

After 7 stores in four hours (and purchases at 5) I finally had enough errands run that I could stay home for a bit and test some recipes for Coronation.

The cheese tajine worked out well but I had a leetle mishap with the Khabisa.

See, the ‘fun’ part of medieval recipes is figuring out what in the world they really mean, i.e. redacting them. Luckily someone already translated them, and there are charts on what the old measurement names mean in today’s cooking vernacular. The issue that faced me was figuring out what, exactly, 1/2 a mudd of semolina flour equated. Answer? About half of what I thought.

Mudds weren’t covered in my first resource so I had to go digging only to find where they equalled, supposedly, 4.somthing liters. A few conversion charts later I came up with about 16 cups (rounding down) = 1 mud. 16 cups is roughly 8 pounds, so half a mudd is 4 pounds. well, I was making a third of the recipe (because I only had one bottle of the pomegranate juice on hand) so I figured I needed 1.3 pounds of semolina flour. Simple enough, right?

Um…

So I boiled the pomegranate juice, sugar and rosewater twice then added the 1.3 pounds of semolina flour. The flour which immediately absorbed the juice mixture with plenty of room left over! Oops. So… apparently my math is a little shaky or my mudd source was not quite correct for my manuscript. Since I had the cheese tajine in the oven I couldn’t quite rush out for more juice until it came out, so I set the crumbly mixture to the side for a bit. The good news was that it was at least tasty.

I am so impressed that the nearest store actually carried the pomegranate juice. Winn-Dixie isn’t exactly known for its selection and pomegranate juice is probably not on the average WD-shopper’s list, but there it was in their miniscule chilled fruit section. Wohoo!

Thankfully the second batch of juice reliquified the first batch, though it was still a little tough to stir. Something tells me starting with the right amount of liquid will make it easier next time out. The resulting desserts were very purple, tasted pretty good, and were a little chewy, but again that might be from the ‘dessert, interrupted’ thing. But hey, a double recipe (well, I suppose it’s actually a 2/3 recipe all things considered) makes 6 dozen of the things.

Tomorrow morning I’ll test out the lentil and eggplant dishes, maybe even the lamb roulade, and some of them will go with me to the pool party tomorrow afternoon.