Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Gospel Gourmet.

Let me start by admitting that I’m exaggerating with the title here. This is neither Gospel, nor is it Gourmet. But it is food, and it was inspired by the Bible, so that’s got to count, right?  We’ll call it blogger’s license and leave it at that.

As we continue working our way through the unit on Trust, we’re studying the life of Elijah and how he clearly modeled faith in God. Konos recommends using well-written biographies of the characters being studied to help children learn about them in a deeper and more permanent way than a single paragraph on Wikipedia might offer. I’ve struggled to find good biographies that I can read to my girls as Family Reading books. Granted, I’ve only looked in our local library, and that could be the reason behind the struggle. However, I love to write. The girls both would like to write to some degree some day, and certainly need all the practise they can get. So I considered, and decided that if we wrote our own biographies, we’d learn so much:

  • Lots about the character in question.

  • Lots about the process of writing a story.

  • Lots about actually writing: grammar, spelling, sentence construction etc.


And I’d let them illustrate the books, of course, so there’s Art, too.

We’re starting with Elijah. Instead of a quick overview we’re studying his life in depth, making notes, creating spider diagrams … it’s fun! One of the stories we read this week was about Elijah staying with the widow who has only a small jar of oil and a handful of flour left before she and her son would expire. Elijah encouraged her to use that to make a cake – for him! And another for her and her son, of course. And he promised that the flour and oil wouldn’t run out, which it didn’t. I loved how Elijah trusted and obeyed God without question, and how the widow trusted and obeyed Elijah without question. In each case, they did not surrender their ability to reason, nor their autonomy and self-respect. They simply obeyed, and were immensely blessed for it!

Interestingly, we were in a similarly frugal state as I was reading that so I was inspired to try my hand at a similar kind of “cake” for the kids’ lunch. I cheated a it by adding a little milk, some water (there was a drought in the story, remember?), some herbs, salt, and a sprinkle of grated Parmesan cheese on top. (Yes, I do see the irony of having Parmesan in the fridge when we’ve used up the bread, but there were Extenuating Circumstances). I am hopeless at pancakes so I crafted some herby crumpets and the girls loved them! They really enjoyed seeing what the food could have been like, as well as just really enjoying the taste, too.

It actually led me to another train of thought about Bible food, but I’ll cover that somewhere else, I think.

The recipe is here.