Arme Ritter & Heritage in Food

The part they'll actually remember. Nothing about a camping trip prepares you for the day after the camping trip. We got back late last night after five days away in Staffordshire, England. Today was supposed to be relaxing and lazily getting back into routine. It's gone instead on putting away the camping gear, cutting the grass/weeds, and a bag of clothes that spent a week in a damp field. The trip wasn't restful. I'd like to say I did some thinking up there, or made a plan or two. What it felt like was continually stopping the youngest from licking things, while the eldest kept finding her new things to lick.The high spot (literally) was walking up to Thor's Cave. It sits in the hillside above the Manifold Valley and looks like what a child draws when you ask them for a cave. My son carried a stick and three foraged hazelnuts the entire way. All the way up, and all the way down. But the part I'll remember is breakfast. Arme Ritter (aka German toast, French toast, eggy bread, etc..) happens in our home often enough, but it's still something special. However, make it on a camping stove with two children queuing in the damp, and it becomes something they'll bring up in twenty years. That's most of what I'm doing with the food. Nobody in this house wants a lecture on where they come from, and I'd be terrible at delivering one. So the meal does it instead. Repeat it often enough and the cultural identity comes along for free. I wrote the longer version of this that starts with the recipe card in your drawer that nobody can read anymore. Most families have one. Even if almost nobody makes it. Read it → Steady Kids Know Where They Come From My mom's Arme Ritter is on Quick German Recipes and takes about twenty minutes. France didn't invent it and Germany has been making their own since the 14th century. But the oldest written version turns up in a Roman cookbook, which I didn't see coming. Make it → Oma's Arme Ritter / German Toast My kids are bicultural whether I do anything about it or not. Half of it arrives effortlessly, since living in Wales handles the Welsh part without me lifting a finger. The German and the Canadian halves get no such deal. So I'll keep making German toast on a camping stove. Some day one of my kids will make it for someone else, and there will be a story to go along with it. P.S. The licking phase is apparently normal. The eldest handing her things to lick is, I'm told, also normal. Nobody warned me they'd form a team.

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Arme Ritter & Heritage in Food

The part they'll actually remember.

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