SC - Seeking comments/More info
Becki Tants
rt46 at cornell.edu
Fri Jan 5 08:41:34 PST 2001
Hi folks -
As per the event announcement I posted yesterday, I am running a modified
Iron Chef Medieval this April. Here's the information I'm sending to
interested parties. I'd appreciate any comments you may have, and more
teams are even better. (We have 2-3 committed so far, with more people
starting to express interest every day....)
Ru
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The concept is a modified iron chef, where the dishes created are served
for feast. It will be modified in that each team will be told the
ingredient in advance and need to come up with menu and ingredients list in
advance. They will have the choice of shopping themselves (with a budget
set by me) or letting us do the shopping for them. I'll also be using this
to try and balance the feast and coordinate kitchen resources.
The more teams we get, the less each will have to do - the intent is to
produce a 2-3 course feast, with basics (bread, butter, perhaps rice)
provided by our folks. If we get 6 teams, we can do an excellent 3 course
feast with each team only having to make a couple of dishes. If we get 2
teams, they're likely to be working much harder. If we get 10 teams, no
one will have to do more then one dish.
If teams want to do some or even all the work in advance, that's ok. All
teams will be asked to at least have a representative present in the
morning for the schtick announcement of the ingredient. (A friend is
teasing me about making me something really loud to wear and a marzipan or
sugarpaste pepper to bite into.) The kitchen is HUGE and has many
separate workstations. They serve lunch for 4100 students every day from
here, so we should have all the equipment we need. (I can provide pictures
and a sketchy inventory.) There will also be room in the main hall to
create workspaces, and I'd like to see at least a couple of people doing
prep work or dessert stuff out there who can answer questions.
I am considering (and am certainly open to comments) the idea of having a
different theme ingredient for each course. Regardless, the theme
ingredient is likely to be either a fruit (apple, plum) or something like
ginger - something that is common to most cuisines in period, versatile in
how it can be prepared, and to which few people are allergic. (I'm
actively soliciting suggestions!)
The product of all this will be served for the feast that night. There
will be 3 levels of judges. The "Iron Chef" type judges who think
everything is wonderful and include people like a jock (Knight?) and a
psychic - these will be mostly for show and laughs. Then the people will
be allowed to vote for their favorites as well, and we would also like the
cooking laurels to do the same.
I'm not requiring documentation for this, since my goal is to make this an
easy way for someone who is terrified of doing an entire feast to try doing
just a piece, and laugh a little on the way, but I certainly think that
people who do should be rewarded at least by the laurels.
Current timetable is that I would like teams to let me know by 7 Deadlies
(Feb 10th) if they are participating, with a menu/ingredients list due by
Ice Dragon (March 24th). If we have a lot of teams, I may ask different
one's to tell me their specialties and assign types of dishes that
way.... Once the team list is finalized, I'll announce the ingredients to
each team captain.
A team can be however many people you want - in the real iron chef
competitions, each chef has a bunch of helpers running around, and I see no
reason to change that.
There is no rule that says that a team has to stick to the budget I provide
- - just that anything above and beyond it is out of their own pocket. (Or,
as I said, we can do the shopping here - I'll base budget's off what it
would cost me and as long as we're still clear of the $7/head total it
shouldn't be a big deal.)
Thoughts?
Caitlin Ruadh
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Rebecca (Becki) Tants Phone: (607) 254-8898
Data Warehouse Architect Fax: (607) 255-6982
Cornell University E-mail: rt46 at cornell.edu
120 Maple Ave., Ithaca NY 14850
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