Croatia Unit

Hi, Future Ticia 2023 here, we repeated our Croatia unit in high school, or maybe it was 8th grade, nope definitely high school checked when I took the pictures. It was fun to remake the recipe and actually be successful this time, it’s amazing what more than 5 years of cooking unique recipes will do for your skills. This was a fun geography lesson to add to our Europe Mega-Unit. I now return you to 2014 Ticia, I’ll be back from time to time with more additions.

(there are affiliate links in here)

I’m finally getting our Croatia country study posted, just a month or so late….  I kept putting off posting about Croatia because I had a craft I wanted to do, but I finally gave up on completing the craft and decided to post our Croatia country study, if for no other reason than I have another country to get them working on.

Croatia Unit: resources

Future Ticia 2023 is already back, I now include where you can find out about the country, so here you go. My library didn’t really have any books on Croatia, but we have an amazing internet with lots of places to find ideas.

• National Geographic: Croatia
• Kids World Travel: Croatia
• 109 Facts about Croatia– They couldn’t find 1 more to make 110, or 2 to make 111? 111 is a nice not round number
• 25 Croatia facts– included primarily because of the pictures
• 50 Croatia facts– Again, pretty pictures, so very very pretty

But to get to what became our primary source for most countries as time went on:

But that search did turn up some interesting videos that I’m going to include, I haven not watched all of these, but they seem promising.

A history of Croatia that looks to be pretty decent (I always take it as a good sign when a native Croat says it’s decent):

General comments seem to also approve of this video:

Now back to Ticia 2014

Croatia Unit recipe: Croatian nut roll

I looked through the different Croatian recipes and found this Croatian nut roll.  I figured I could probably make this…..  I really should have known better, but I’ll let you pretend it didn’t go horribly wrong (though still tasty).

(Brief comment from Future Ticia 2023, I will include a recipe card at the end of this from when I remade it, but I leave you with this super crazy original description)

Useful things you can get on Amazon:

chopped nuts, pizza sheet (I like cooking on stoneware)

1.  Go on a wild shopping spree to buy all of the ingredients, yeast packets, check, walnuts, check, butter, check.  All right let’s start mixing.

2.  Start pulling out ingredients.  Think about pounding your head through the wall when you realize you bought salted butter instead of sweet cream butter.  Okay, don’t add extra salt, I can do that.  Melt butter, start cracking eggs, and mixing.

2b.  1 pound of butter!  ONE POUND, that’s all the butter I can find in my refrigerator.  ALL OF IT.  Not one bit left.

3.  Clean the counter after the kids crack the eggs.  Stir feverishly.  Scald milk, how do you tell it’s scalded?  Who knows, just take it off when it’s hot, and maybe there was something about forming a skin on top.  I don’t know.  So many steps in this recipe.

4.  How much flour?  10 cups?  That’s a lot of flour.  I’m glad I picked the biggest bowl we own.  Will we have enough flour?  Okay, that’s all mixed in and my wrists are now hurting from pounding the flour into the dough.

4b.  Listen to commentary from the kids about how much work it is, and how thankful they are we don’t have to do this every time we want to eat bread.  Seriously it’s a lot of work for this bread.  I think the creator of the recipe lied about the time involved.  Total time 1 hour 20 minutes.  LIAR!  Your pants are so on fire.

5.  Get out the walnuts, and that’s when I realized I was completely and totally screwed.

The recipe did not say 3 cups of walnuts, which I’d already thought was a lot.

It said 3 POUNDS, yes 3 POUNDS of walnuts.  Start going through the pantry to find anything else that resembles a nut.  We find: honey roasted almond slices, pistachios, and some walnuts from another recipe.

6.  Gleefully start smashing those walnuts because you need to take out some aggression.

6b.  How hard is it to smash nuts into small pieces?  We have now smashed through about 4 gallon ziploc bags, and they just are not breaking into little bitty pieces, some are, but most aren’t.  The recipe says to pulse it in your blender.

I don’t have a blender.  It fell off the top of the refrigerator nearly brained Superman, and shattered into a million pieces that I still find over 2 months later. [Future Ticia 2023 says, we found pieces of that blender for almost a year, the kids still talk about that almost 10 years later]

I have a magic bullet.  I should say “I had a magic bullet,” I think I blew out the motor trying to pulse the nuts.

I did get a fine powder. for a few, most were still large chunks.

Give up on this, I strongly considered taking up drinking at this point.

7?  Oh forget this, just mix it all together.  What?  1/2 pound butter?  Seriously and evaporated milk (and in case you’re wondering condensed milk does not work, and you cannot substitute that for normal milk in Mac and Cheese).

7.59.  Melt the butter, find a can of evaporated milk, mix all that together with the nut mixture, and it still looks rather not right.

Oh, what the heck, the recipe is already so far gone, why not throw in some oatmeal?  That’ll help make it thicker.

Mix in oatmeal.

8.  I’ll pretend I’m on step 8.  Divide dough into 8-12 pieces, these are freaking huge rolls.  Much bigger than the picture.  Roll it out.  At this point, the kids are just plain silly.  There’s no hope for it.

9.  Spoon nut mixture onto the dough and somehow roll it up.

10.  Shove in the oven and cook for 20 minutes, look at the bread and cook for another 10 minutes.

For all the drama and craziness the Croatian nut bread actually turned out pretty good.  Well, Jeff and I really liked it.  The kids weren’t so sure about it, but I think that’s because they knew all the steps where the recipe went wrong.

Croatian Nutbread

Print

This delicious Croatian nut bread is a great dessert to serve on special occasions

Prep Time 1 hour

Cook Time 25 minutes

Total Time 1 hour 25 minutes

Ingredients

• Dough
• 2 cups milk
• 6 3/4 teaspoons yeast (3 packages)
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 lb (4 sticks) melted butter
• 10 cups flour
• Filling
• 3 lbs chopped walnuts
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup evaporated milk
• 1/2 pound (2 sticks) melted butter
• 3 cups brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• optional: beaten egg

Instructions

1. Bring milk almost to a boil, then remove from heat. In large mixing bowl combine warm milk and yeast.
2. Add beaten eggs to the milk yeast mixture and stir for 2 minutes.
3. Mix in sugar and butter.
4. Slowly add in the flour, cover and set aside.
5. Mix together chopped walnuts, sugar, and mllk.
6. Then add in the butter, brown sugar, salt, and vanilla. The filling should be thick and moist.
7. Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees and grease a cookie sheet
8. Separate dough into roughly 12 balls, then roll out each ball into a long flat oval shape about 1/4 inch thick.
9. Spread about 1/4 cup of nut mixture over the dough to form a thin covering, staying about 1/2 to 1 inch away from the edges.
10. Fold in the long edges of the dough about 1/2 inch on either side, then fold up one short edge about 1 1/2 inch. Start rolling the unfolded side and gently press to seal the roll. Place seam side down on the cookie sheet.
11. Brush top of rolls with beaten eggs.
12. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until tops appear golden brown.

Croatia for elementary kids: country report

Since Croatia is a relatively new country there isn’t as much information and crafts on it.  It was very interesting to see the kids interpret what I put together for them into a report.

All in all, Croatia is an interesting country, but putting together a Croatia for elementary kids unit (this printable summary is in the subscriber section, join my newsletter) was hard.  To get the country report lapbook, head on over to creating country reports.

Croatia Unit notebooking pages

And this is what our Croatia unit looked like in 10th grade. We filled out the Europe notebooking pages.

Since it was fairly early in the alphabet, there is not as much information and I just didn’t write down a lot of cool facts. So here are the three things I wrote about.

• Game of Thrones filmed here
• Dalmatians from here (which is one of the districts here, district is not the right word, but I’m finishing updating this after cleaning up from a leaking toilet and then the dog found 2 pounds of powdered sugar)
• over 1000 islands
• also, heart-shaped island, how cool is that?

And if you want to do some animal reports, here are cool animals from Croatia:

• red fox
• bottlenose dolphin
• fire salamander (an animal I’m used to hearing about in fantasy books, not as a real animal)
• Dalmatian dogs (obviously)

Are you looking for more geography resources, then try The Ultimate Homeschool Geography Guide.

Looking for more ideas?

My best guess for when we studied Croatia those two times was 4th grade and 10th grade, s I’ll grab a couple of ideas for those ages.

• Vermont Unit
• Sun Unit
• High School Chemistry
• Spiderwick Chronicles book club
• Layers of the Atmosphere lesson

image used under Creative Commons

Originally published June 9, 2014