Hardtack

All the boys in my house are obsessed with pirates. Will loves to pretend that he is eating hardtack (he even taps his crackers to get the weevils out!) and drinking grog to prevent scurvy (yes, he knows that you need citrus to prevent scurvy!) as he sails the high seas singing pirate songs. So, on Sunday, as we began our letter H week, Will quickly realized that hardtack starts with the letter H and he begged Gene to make some. Gene has a recipe and has made hardtack before, so he quickly agreed and the boys spent some time after lunch making these biscuits.

In case you aren't as familiar with the pirate life as we are, hardtack is simply a very, very hard biscuit made from flour, water and maybe some salt. It is double-baked to get all the moisture out and has a shelf-life of one year, so it was great to have on board a ship.
Even before it goes into the oven, this stuff is pretty hard. The recipe calls for 2-inch square biscuits, so Gene got out the ruler and the boys helped measure and count by twos.Then they had to prick the dough so it wouldn't riseand bake it for one hour. We skipped baking it a second time (because we really don't need it to last a year!). We incorporate science into everything, so the boys had to observe the hardtack first.

Trying the hardtack...

It's really hard! We decided to soak the hardtack in a bowl of water so that the boys could actually eat it!

And what's a pirate meal without some grog? Gene made the boys rum-less grog, which was just water with a splash of Rose's lime juice. Henry was less than impressed, but Will drank it up!

ARRGH! We're just like real pirates now!