Cooking with Sarah

This past week’s Abraham workshop was Cooking with Sarah. Genesis 18 was our text, where the three visitors came “at the heat of the day” and Abraham and Sarah cooked a meal for them. We used The Good Book Cookbook as our guide to re-create these recipes.

On Sunday we made bread out of whole wheat flour, salt, and water. I had the kids help me make the dough and they each got to knead a piece of their own for 10 minutes. In the actual recipe you let the dough rest for 3 hours after kneading, then you roll it out and let it rest for another 30 minutes before baking. So this recipe took around 4 hours, not including the time it would have taken to grind the grain. So if the visitors got to Abraham’s in the afternoon they wouldn’t have been able to eat the bread until dinner. I had prepared some bread ahead of time for the kids to eat. It was a lot like pita bread and all the kids loved it and took some home to share with their families.

Wednesday we made cheese curds. The recipe is very easy; it just takes planning and patience. Again, I had made some ahead of time and used class time to demonstrate a portion of the process. I brought an electric burner to class so we could cook the soured milk (milk with some vinegar added) and watch the solids separate. We then poured the “clabber” into a sieve over a bowl so that the whey would drain out and leave the curd. I explained to the kids that it takes another 6 hours to drain before they could eat the cheese curd. We discussed what it must have been like for Sarah and her servants to make this everyday from the left over milk from their animals, and how long they had to wait before eating it. This time the class was divided- about 2/3 of the kids really liked the curds and went back for seconds, and the other 1/3 wasn’t sure if they liked it or not. I loved it and made some for Ryan and me to eat at home!

To wrap up the lesson, we loosely connected the waiting time for this food to how long Abraham had to wait to see God’s promises, and even then he didn’t get to see them all (see Hebrews 11). It took several decades before the promise of Isaac was fulfilled, another 500 years or so before the Israelites made it to Canaan (the “promised land”), and 2,000 years before Jesus came. We had a great discussion about patience and having faith that God will keep his promises.