Although our Thanksgiving feast is not until next week, the Emeryville Children's House began preparing food weeks ago! It all began with our bumper crop of pumpkins in the organic vegetable garden. In September, we began harvesting, roasting, peeling and mashing the pumpkin and freezing it for our eventual pies.
In October, a surfeit of apples brought for snack led us to prepare three bags of apple pie filling that also went into the freezer. Earlier this month, a family surprised us with a two-pound bag of fresh cranberries, and we cooked them and... yes, put them in the freezer. (Our freezer has begun to get a bit full.)
This week, our tasks have been to make pie crust, roll it out, line the pie tins, and freeze them (we just managed to squeak them in)...
...and to make three loaves of sourdough bread for the herbed bread stuffing for the feast.
Our sourdough starter is "fed" twice a day, at 8:30 and 4:30. The children mix a thick paste of flour and water and stir it into the jar with a wooden spoon.
Learning to knead the dough is a lot of fun, and harder than it looked. Lift, push down, turn, lift, push down, turn.
Our square "loaves" of bread may look a bit unusual, but they will be easier to cut into cubes to make our stuffing next week!
