[Sca-cooks] 12th Night gifts.

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

From: "Olwen the Odd" <olwentheodd at hotmail.com>
>So.  We have all talked about the work and the sore feet and the chairs (or
>lack of) and the lobsters and the feasters, but how about the gifts?
>
>What all did you folks give and get from each other?

When cooking "Iron Chef Persian", friends not too awfully far from
the site - but really far from where i live - allowed me to take over
their kitchen and dirty their cookware for 12 hours - and they even
assisted me cooking on the Friday right before. And then they let me
take some of their big pots and serving utensils and knives to the
feast! I used up all my salt and had to use theirs, and i used up my
whole 5 lb bag of sugar and had to use theirs, so...

I gave them some evaporated sea salt from Brittany and three kinds of
sugars (demerarra, turbinado, and dark muscovado), since getting them
a box of regular salt and a bag of regular white granulated sugar
wouldn't be special.

(and, uh, one of them is on this list... Hi :-)

I also gave these to another friend who put me up for around 6 weeks
and is a real experimental hands-on cook and allowed me to plunder
her files of costume and textile information.

To both these people and another SCAdian who put me up for about a
week, i gave spice powders which i ground and blended myself:
1) Ras el-Hanout for Coffee - a modern blend based on a recipe in
Paula Wolfert's "Couscous and other good foods from Morocco" - with
my own variations;
2) Hypocras Spices - my blend based on Le Menagier de Paris which
includes spikenard and grains of paradise - plus a little cloth bag
to put the spices into before putting them in the wine or juice;
3) Specia Forte e Negre - i needed long pepper for this, but the kilo
i bought in Morocco was in storage, so instead of equal parts of
black pepper and long pepper, i used equal parts of black pepper,
cubeb, and grains of paradise, plus lesser amounts of cloves and
nutmeg.

(BTW, apparently long pepper is used in Chinese medicine, so i'll be
checking out Chinatown soon - just a hint for anyone else who wants
some and doesn't want to spend $5 per ounce)

I labeled each package with Name, Weight, Ingredients listed in order
of amount used, and Suggestions for Use (with the sugars, i mostly
copied the hype on the original packages :-)

I really really owe a whole bunch of people in my Kingdom stuff,
because so many people have been so good to me, sharing info with me,
supporting me, heck, even liking me! Once i get an apartment, i'll
make stuff for that long list. (BTW, i got accepted at one, i'm
meeting with the owners, who live downstairs, tomorrow, and will be
moving in sometime this month.)

I got a necklace of tumbled lapis lazuli from the Minister of the
West Kingdom Needleworkers Guild, for which i manage the website. She
is on my list of people i owe (even if she hadn't given me anything)
because she has been really kind and supportive of me, even where
there was some friction between me and another Kingdom Minister.

Anahita