[Sca-cooks] Feast Alternatives

[Siegfried Heydrich]

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    I have a question and request for input from the list . . . has anyone ever done any alternative take out food for those gentles who can't get feast? At the moment, Kingdom (living perpetual fear that it might lose money on feast) limits feast to 150. Last Coronation, we had 1,200 or so on site. Needless to say, the overwhelming majority of them didn't eat feast. There was much grumbling, as would be expected, and I'm looking to address the matter. Too many had to go off-site, or make do with Scooby-snacks.
    My households tavern does a friday travelers meal, breakfast, and lunch, but have not done dinners to keep from competing with the feastcrat, and also because I really don't want to burn our people out. I'm up at 0600 getting set up for breakfast, but I don't expect the others to be quite so masochistic. We generally stay open until we run out of food, which is around 3 pm (If I bought correctly). I try to let them be free to do the things for which everyone else attends an event, and have fun.
    What I'm considering is a camp meal for groups - I don't want to serve individual dinners, as that's way too much of a pain. My prep tools are a slightly mongo smoker (I can run about 125 lbs at a time), a couple of peanut cookers, and a 3 burner stove with a small oven. What I'm looking at doing is a meal for 4 (as a basic unit - larger camps can order on that basis) for about $20. For that, they get a rack of ribs or a smoked roasting hen or capon (not one of those scrawny fryers they sell from the grocery store delis), 4 baked potatoes or ears of corn (depending on season), a foil package of roasted seasonal veggies, 1/2 loaf of french bread, and setups.
    The way I want to run the process is as follows - People will come to the tavern and place their orders, pre-paying at that time. As each order is placed at the tavern, we write the order on a brown paper grocery bag, and have the customer sign it  . . . Cutoff for orders is 1200 - at that point, I make a cell phone call to the Wal-Mart (about 20 miles away) and place the order for whatever we need, so it'll be there pulled when we arrive.  We make our store run - pick up whatever we need for the orders. We're considering offering a pickup service as well, but I suspect that'll be more of a pain than it's worth.
    We pick up what's needed, return to camp, get the food prepped and into the heat. The veggies will go in during the last hour of cooking to avoid overdoing them. When they're done, we pull them, wrap the meats in foil, assemble the remaing items, and place each order into the paper bags . . . the ones with the people's names on them. Pickup time will be 5:00 pm. For those running late, we stash the bags containing the orders in our warming box, and trust in the honesty of SCAdians to grab their orders without bothering anyone else's . . .
     Does anyone have any (constructive) comments on how the process could be improved upon or suggestions for menu items? I'm not trying for authenticity, here, I just want to have good food available for those unable to get feast. We're not looking at making a huge profit, but I'll be switched if I'm going to LOSE money on this. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear 'em!

    Sieggy

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