Monaco Unit

Going into our Monaco Unit, pretty much all I knew about Monaco was it was the size of a city and Grace Kelly married their prince and became a princess. Coming out of our Monaco Unit, I know a little bit more, but it was hard to find resources about Monaco. That is the difficulty of these smaller lesser-known countries. But, we did find a fun bread recipe for our geography lessons, so that was good.

(there aren’t all that many affiliate links in here, but there are a few)

Our Monaco Unit Study Resources

I’m sure you are shocked to find out our library had no books on this small country.

None. Zero. Zilch.

So, let me give you some websites I’ve looked up for this post:

• 38 INTERESTING facts about Monaco– not many super unusual things to know
• Monaco Embassy Facts– For being such a rich country, they have not put much into their website
• Monaco Facts– Primarily I share this because it has great pictures

But, thankfully Monaco is right smack in the middle of the alphabet, so Geography Now already has their video out for it, so we watched their video.

From there we watched this video about why they’re so rich. I find it interesting that these small city-state countries figured out how to keep their countries independent by using banking laws and ideas.

The big thing the kids were amazed by was its size. Like, we go farther to get to our nearest grocery store than the entire distance of the country.

Monaco unit : Fresch herb fougasse recipe

I discovered most of the recipes for Monaco are actually from either Italy or France, so we finally settled on a Fresh herb fougasse recipe. This was the suggested recipe from the 9 foods of Monaco that had me laughing so much with every recipe not being from Monaco.

Having a side dish actually worked out pretty well because we created a meal together out of all the micro-nations we studied back in December of 2019 (I have to add the date because I’m really random on when I put geography posts together like I started this back in December when I found the recipe and it just sat here until now when I sat down to write the rest of the post).

When I remade the Monaco bread because the pictures were all gone

Training a future chef has made me a lot more hand-wavey about randomly deciding to make bread. As I mentioned, we did this as part of our study of 4 micro-nations in Europe, and apparently, I accidentally deleted the pictures from the bread Batman made. So, I remade it this afternoon so I could have some kind of pictures of stuff.

And because I’m really bad at taking in-process pictures, there are none. Also, it would be really boring because the pictures would just be me watching the mixer.

Huh, this is Future Ticia 2023, and I’m updating the post to have my new logo and I discovered this was right before I started adding recipe cards, so I’m adding that in now.

Fresh herb fougasse ingredients

• 1 pound 2 ounces white bread flour
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt (okay the original recipe only said 10 grams which converts to .35 ounces, but I just threw in some salt)
• 7 grams instant yeast (I accidentally added 9 grams, but I tend to add extra yeast)
• 2 tablespoons olive oil, why is this the only ingredient in this measurement on the recipe?
• 12 ounces of warm water (I learned warm water means around what you would take a shower in
• 2 teaspoons fresh thyme
• 2 teaspoons sage
• 1/2 teaspoon oregano
• sea salt flakes

Things I didn’t do: grease a large container with oil, line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. I’m also going to admit, I learned a different order for making bread.

1. Add the flour and salt together in the mixer.
2. Add the yeast to the warm water, stir to dissolve it.
3. Add the oil to the flour mixture. Slowly stir in the water putting the mixer on low as the water stirs in.
4. After it’s all mixed together, move your mixer to a higher speed and let it mix for about 8-10 minutes.
5. The step I forgot to do. Add the spices in while the dough is mixing and getting its nice elasticity that it gets from kneading.
6. Let the dough rise for an hour or so while covered. It should double in size.
7. Realize that you completely forgot to add the spices to your bread, and grumble that should have happened in step 4.
8. Split the dough into two halves. Spread each half out into a roughly oval shape.
9. Cut a slit down the middle, and then cut some more slits perpendicular to that. Grumble that your knife isn’t really cutting, and then pull the dough into a kind of leaf shape.
10. Let the dough rest for 20 minutes as your oven heats up to 395 Fahrenheit. Drizzle more oil over the top then sprinkle the oregano all over it. Bake for 20 minutes

Monaco Fresh Herb Fougasse Bread

Print

Try this delicious flat bread recipe.

Prep Time 15 minutes

Cook Time 20 minutes

Additional Time 1 hour

Total Time 1 hour 35 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 lb 2 oz flour
• 10 g salt
• 7 g yeast
• 2 tablespoon olive oil
• 12 oz warm water
• 2 teaspoon rosemary
• 2 teaspoon thyme
• 2 teaspoon sage
• 1/2 teaspoon oregano
• kosher salt to finish

Instructions

1. Add the flour and salt together in the mixer.
2. Add the yeast to the warm water, stir to dissolve it.
3. Add the oil to the flour mixture. Slowly stir in the water putting the mixer on low as the water stirs in.
4. After it’s all mixed together, move your mixer to a higher speed and let it mix for about 8-10 minutes.
5. The step I forgot to do. Add the spices in while the dough is mixing and getting its nice elasticity that it gets from kneading.
6. Let the dough rise for an hour or so while covered. It should double in size.
7. Realize that you completely forgot to add the spices to your bread, and grumble that should have happened in step 4.
8. Split the dough into two halves. Spread each half out into a roughly oval shape.
9. Cut a slit down the middle, and then cut some more slits perpendicular to that. Grumble that your knife isn’t really cutting, and then pull the dough into a kind of leaf shape.
10. Let the dough rest for 20 minutes as your oven heats up to 395 Fahrenheit. Drizzle more oil over the top then sprinkle the oregano all over it. Bake for 20 minutes

Monaco Unit: notebooking pages

Because there was so little information to be had, I didn’t add any printables to our Europe geography notebooking pages. Still, we had some fun learning about this.

For all that Monaco was in the middle of the alphabet, I apparently did not write down a lot of facts for the country, but I’m adding in a few I found while looking up interesting facts:

• the country has grown by 20% thanks to land reclamation from the sea
• second smallest country in the world
• the country’s defense is France’s responsibility, BUT it was never part of France
• it is literally a city-state
• they have a zero percent unemployment rate

More European countries to learn about once you’re done with the short Monaco Unit Study

• Luxembourg potato cakes (this was one of our micro countries)
• Italy picture books (since updated to Italy Unit)
• Zuppa Tuscana (Italian soup)
• Scones (United Kingdom)
• Danish meatballs

User:Berthold Wernerld Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons