Andorra Unit Study

I headed into the Andorra Unit Study thinking of Andorians from Star Trek. That was actually the joke I got from my kids and husband every time I said we were going to study Andorra. Just in case you were wondering, no the people of Andorra are not blue-skinned, and they do not have antennas. Just putting that out there, but let’s see what happens with our Andorra unit study. This is going to be quite the geography lesson for our Europe Unit.

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Andorra videos

I’m sure you’re shocked, but a nation smaller than the size of the Dallas/Fort-Worth metroplex, or the state of Rhode Island does not have any books on it at my public library. You know what it does have?

A Geography Now video

 

And a fun Geographics video that had us all laughing as we learned some fun little facts about their history.

 

I mean come on, they accidentally voted a fraud as their king, and then he was removed and jailed for vagrancy, what is not hilarious about that?

Andorra notebooking pages

Our Andorra unit study was those videos and our meal, I’m about to talk about below, so there aren’t any additional printables back in the Subscriber Library (join my newsletter over here).

Now that the kids are old enough, I set them to look up all of the relevant information. Hearing them complaining about who got to look up what can be amusing, but I think the most fun was filling out the fun facts section.

• We sat there with our notebooks as we ate our Andorran meal, and wrote down what stood out to us. You know what we got:
• Cigarette smuggling, because Andorra is duty-free, people buy cheap cigarettes there and resell them.
• They import most of their food, but the most common crops grown are tobacco (going back to the cigarette smuggling) and straw), which is rather hilarious.
• That fraud king, who wouldn’t want to write that down as their fun fact?

Andorra recipe

I found these two recipes: Andorran chicken and a Cream Roll, which I was rather curious to try. I ended up not making the Cream Roll recipe because I had complications from our Andorran chicken recipe.

Andorran chicken recipe ingredients

• 5 or so chicken breasts
• 1/4 cup tarragon vinegar (I could not find that, so I put in apple cider vinegar and thyme as the most suggested substitute [I also did not have tarragon])
• 1 onion chopped
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• 1 teaspoon thyme
• 4 bay leaves (oh crud, I totally forgot these)
• 1 cup dry white wine (I substituted apple juice)
• 28 ounces crushed tomatoes
• 16 ounces of egg noodles

Let’s make that Andorran chicken recipe

First and most importantly, read the instructions at the beginning of the day and realize this is a SLOW COOKER RECIPE.

I originally planned to cook this on Wednesday, but…… I didn’t catch that part. Sigh, that was a big mistake on my part.

1. Marinate the chicken in the vinegar for 30 minutes (I ended up marinating it overnight as the chicken defrosted)
2. Chop up the onion and put it in the slow cooker (I use a slow cooker liner to make the thing easier to clean; this is one of the items on my subscribe and save, so I don’t have to remember to buy it)
3. Drop in the chicken, then sprinkle the spices over it. Pour the wine, and add the tomatoes.
4. Cook on low for 8-10 hours.

We followed their advice to serve it with egg noodles, which is always popular with my kids.  As a general rule, everyone liked it, but I may not have defrosted quite enough of the chicken because the boys were looking at me like they were starving after eating dinner.

Yield: 5

Andorra Chicken Cunillo

Print

Andorran Chicken recipe with tomatoes and spices.

Prep Time 15 minutes

Cook Time 8 hours

Total Time 8 hours 15 minutes

Ingredients

• 1/4 apple cider vinegar with 1 teaspoon of thyme
• 4-7 chicken breasts
• 1 onion chopped
• 1 teaspoon oregano
• 1 teaspoon thyme
• 4 bay leaves
• 1 cup apple juice
• 28 ounces of crushed tomatoes

Instructions

1. Marinate the chicken in the vinegar for at least 30 minutes.
2. Put the onions in the slow cooker, and then place the chicken over the onions.
3. Sprinkle the spices over the chicken.
4. Pour the wine and tomatoes over the whole mixture.
5. Cook on low for 8 to 10 hours.

Notes

Serve with hot buttered egg noodles.

So, that was our Andorra Unit, and it was overall a nice quick unit.

More great 9th-grade ideas

Since we completed this in 9th-grade I’m gonna share some 9th-grade lessons.

• Bulgaria Unit
• War of the Worlds book club
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book club
• high school science experiments– I didn’t write about science much in high school
• Raphael artist study

I forgot to say, the photo is credited to: By MARIA ROSA FERRE – Flickr: Esglèsia romànica Sant Joan de Caselles, Andorra, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16748985