What I Learned Today 11/4/2014

Cub Scouts/Whittling:

I finished my whittling project today. I made my mom a sunrise out of white soap, and then I whittled a heart out of purple soap. That one smells like lavender. I didn't cut myself at all.

Ancient Civilization:

I learned interesting facts about monks. You can see my answer in the picture below!

I learned several interesting facts about the time of the peasants:

The Feudal System is a system that makes a peasant work 50 days a year to keep the land.
A tithe is a payment peasants must give to the pope or they will not be able to come back to the church.
The Doomsday Book is a book that shows witch peasants didn't pay at the end of the year.
A cruck house is a common place for a peasant to live made with straw, manuare, and a few other miscellaneous materials.
Back in the middle ages, Animals were very expensive. to prevent an animal wandering off at night, they would put the animals in their cruck house.
A peasant's bed would be made of a straw mattress, and rough woolen blankets.
A peasant would be promised two baths in their lifetime; one when they are first born, and one when they die. Peasants normally drink alcoholic drinks because the place they throw their poop away is the same place they would drink from.
A peasants child would normally live to six months old before it died of disease.

Here I am making peasant soup called POTTAGE!

I also did the activity where I made pottage, a soup that peasants would eat. I made it with my Grama Tina, and then we ate it. It cost us 75 cents a serving but would have been almost free for peasants because they grew all the stuff for the soup, like vegetables, grains, potatoes, and stuff. They called all vegetables herbs back then. In medieval times, the peasants ate tons of vegetables, but the wealthy people didn't because they considered them a poor person food. I thought it turned out really good and was yummy. Here is the recipe:

1 litre of water (adding some vegetable stock powder or cube makes it tastier).

Choose a selection of the following vegetables (about 250g of each will do):

cabbage

carrots

celery

green beans

leeks

onions

parsnips

sorrel

turnips

garlic was also grown, but you don't need 250g – one or two cloves will do

A selection of fresh herbs (to be authentic, though dried will do) chosen from:

basil

marjoram

parsley

rosemary

sage

thyme

2tbs oats (porridge oats)

Making and cooking it

Wash and prepare the vegetables – eg taking off outer skins etc

Chop the vegetables and the herbs

Put them all into the stock

Bring the soup to the boil

Turn down the heat and simmer until vegetables are cooked

Add enough oats to thicken and simmer again until cooked

You may enjoy it better with a little salt and pepper

Minecraft Redstone Lab:

I had to make a Hidden Crafting Table in my peasant build. It's a Redstone contraption. In “inside of the machine – front,” there is a line of redstone next to two redstone repeaters. (the thing with two dots are the repeaters.) Above the line of redstone are pressure plates that trigger it. (it is also called a redstone signal instead.) When the redstone gets activated, it goes into the redstone repeaters, activating them, and disabling the redstone torch. (the torch that glows red.) The way a redstone repeater works, is it is able to send a signal through a block. So, the redstone torch turns off, the piston un-retracts, and then, the repeater that has a block over next to it, is able to power the redstone dot in “Inside of the Machine – Front” powering the piston behind the block, pushing the block where the crafting table was, and because the signal ends because the redstone has nowhere to go, the redstone torch turns on making the piston pop up. It looks like “Hidden Crafting Table – Hidden.” when you hit the pressure plate again, the same thing happens but pushes the crafting table up instead of the other block, and it should look like “Hidden Crafting Table – Shown.