Tiger Nut Sweets

Today I made up a list for the girls: piano, math, history, historical recipe, raking leaves, pulling up the dead pumpkin plants that are making our neighbor crazy.

Our neighbor pulls our weeds and came up to inspect a weathergram Evelyn made. A weathergram is a thought about weather or seasons written on a strip of grocery bag and hung up to be finished by the weather. I got this idea from a book I love called If You're Trying to Teach Kids How to Write You've Gotta Have This Book.

I don't think our neighbor loved this idea. Scraps of grocery bag tied onto a tree with yarn do not look like art or poetry to him, especially when curled up by humidity.

Greta's weathergram

Ev and Clem watched the lecture on Spanish, French, Dutch and Swedish colonies in the New World. This time I gave them the review questions ahead of time and asked them to be looking out for the answers. Clementine came running to me whenever she heard an answer, and Evelyn came afterward to report.

Then it was time to choose a recipe. I was thinking we'd finally make the cranberry tartlets. But I failed to specify a time period so we made an Egyptian dessert, said to be among the oldest recorded recipes, found scratched on an ostracum or pottery shard.

Tiger Nut Sweets
20 pitted dates mashed with a little water
cinnamon
1 cup walnuts chopped
1 cup pecans ground
1/2 cup honey

Mix the mashed dates and walnuts and cinnamon to taste. Roll in honey. Roll in ground pecans.

This was our second time making them and they were extra delicious because made with our own honey.

This recipe is special to my beekeepers because Egyptians, they tell me, were the first beekeepers. People have always raided beehives, but Egyptians were the first to make hives to raise bees in.

They Egyptians even chose the bee as a symbol to represent lower Egypt. Thutmose III gave offerings of honey to the god Amun.

We never got around to the raking and pulling up the dead pumpkin plants. I guess it is time to make another offering of honey to our neighbor.