SC - Horror Stories

[Angie Malone]

I have to confess, I created my own horror story, but I was ignorant and it
won't happen again.

I was the head cook/feastocrat whatever term you want to use which equals
it was my problem to get the feast out.  I didn't have a source for a lot
of advice so this whole thing was planned mostly on my own.

We have always had access to one of the dining hall kitchens at the local
college, so it has all the convection ovens, stove burners, and vats, and
steams and any thing you can imagine in an industrial strength kitchen.

When we first were granted access we could use equipment but we needed our
own pots and pans.  I got that reversed quickly.  Although pans for the
oven wouldn't be much of a problem but the pots, that would've been stupid.

I had a schedule for everything but made some bad judgements, like we don't
need to bother to cut anything up the night before--even though it is a
feast of 100 or so, and people who volunteered to help weren't able to help
after all.  The feast was three courses,  and was supposed to start at 6pm.
That's just the background.  Now the day of cooking.

I had one volunteer who was the sane one of the two of us.  He looked over
all the recipes and said, hmmm... I think we should have had a chopping
session but that's okay.  So the volunteers we had started chopping. One
volunteer wasn't used to the knife set he was using so even though he had
40 years of kitchen experience he stuck himself with the point of the knife
and even though he didn't need stitches it took a while to get the bleeding
to stop.  There were two other kitchen injuries, nothing serious, just
required band aids and switching duties.

In the middle of all of this, first the autocrat wanted to steal my kitchen
helper because he is also a fencing marshall, and he was almost needed to
run the tournament, (I told him if he laid one hand on Page, my assistant,
he'd die, and wouldn't be able to finish autocrating the event, the
autocrat walked away.) Then a few minutes later the autocrat told  my
assistant and I the tournament was running late how about if we change the
feast to 7pm we said sure, no problem (whew!!! now we have more time.)
About an hour later a few more volunteers have either had reasons to bail,
or haven't showed up at all.  Now I am getting stressed, I didn't want to
use the kitchen aid industrial size vegetable chopper (you can tell if the
machine is used...you all know it.), but it's starting to look like this is
going to blow up.  Then the autocrat comes in says 'what's wrong' I said,
'not enough help in kitchen'.  He went and found me a bunch of guys who are
mundanely in the army and were sort of bored 'cause they didn't have armor
to fight.  The were the best set of kitchen works I've ever seen.  You tell
them, 'chop these like this' and pretty soon they are done and looking for
more to do.  A little later the autocrat comes in says never mind the
tournament  is back on schedule we'll change the feast back to 6 pm.

My assistant was out taking a break so I forgot to tell him, so around 5 pm
I started reminding everyone to step on it and he asked why we still have
two hours, and I said didn't I tell you it's 6pm.

Luckily around 5:45 the person who has bossed the servers around for the 18
years that I have been in the SCA, came in and asked what was going on, and
I told him we were a little behind.  We ended up starting the 1st course at
6:10  or so but most everyone knew it was my first time so they were
patient with me.  We only had one off-board reservation the rest of the
people were on board.  We had some leftovers, but not  a lot.  Mostly what
we had was the soup from lunch which I ended up giving most of it to the
army guys as a reward for helping out in the kitchen.

I bought bread already baked because I've never made bread before and I
didn't want to risk screwing it up,  and having to have someone go out and
buy bread anyway.

I have to admit, I am used to living in a chaotic world, and am so
optimistic I knew everything would turn out alright just because.  I got
many compliments on the feast, and even though I had been on my feet from 8
am till 11 pm. I would've done it the next day if you asked me to.  I am so
grateful to the person who was helping in the kitchen because he made sure
the schedule was being followed while I answered those little questions
that keep popping up while you are trying to do something, and grateful he
didn't kill me.

I still would do it all again in a minute just with better plans!

	Angeline


Lady Angeline di Aquila
email:alm4 at cornell.edu
Deputy Seneschal Dominion of Myrkfaelinn
  mka. Angie Malone       mundanely located in Ithaca, NY


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