[Sca-cooks] Newbiew Collegeium feast - Why I have been quiet for awhile (long)

[Barbara Benson]

Greetings,

It has been awhile since I have posted much of anything, and it is because
of the craziness that has been going on for the last little bit. One of the
local groups (not my own) just hosted their third Newcomers Collegium this
weekend. About 2 - 2 1/2 weeks ago I got a call from the autocrat (one of my
dearest friends) to say that their Feastcrat (who was a first timer) had
just graduated from school and received an immediate job offer and was
moving to Arizona.....before the event. She then asked if I could do the
feast. I said of course and that started the wild ride.

The Budget: $5 a head for 75 people. Total $375 (more on this later)
The Site: This is a small day only site with one covered and walled pavilion
and a covered with no walls picnic pavilion. The "kitchen" was inside the
covered and walled pavilion, just right out in the hall with no seperation,
and consisted of a residential stove, refrigerator and sink with one 15 foot
bar height counter. The distance between the counter and the wall was the
width of the stove, and you couldn't open the stove and the 'fridge at the
same time because they formed a corner. Of course, all I had was a
description because I didn't have time to go visit.
The Group: This is a wonderful little Shire that is in it's third year of
resurrecting itself from a slump where they did not do much of anything.
They are just getting going but they do not have much in the way of kitchen
or serving stuff - but they are working on it.

The solution to the Facility challenge: The idea behind this event is to
give newcomers a taste of a full blown event, but on a less intimidating
scale, so this feast needed to be close to the format a "standard" feast
would have. If it weren't for that the facilities would have pushed me
towards doing a bar-b-q type feast, not period, but easy on the kitchen (and
me). But I needed to give the newbies the feel of a feast so onward! I am
lucky enough to live in a group that was ready to help me out in any way.
Our new Baron - Borgar the Bright, being of the Chirhart household is in the
"Have kitchen will travel" category so I asked him and his lovely wife
(Lauriettia) if they could bring their field kitchen set up. With this I
received a couple of fish cookers, large pots and pans and chafing dishes
and a HUGE, two sided grill that Baron Borgar rented from his Marine base.
And his irreplaceable help running the grill.

The Food:
The previous feastcrat had developed a menu and prepurchased meat. While the
menu she had planned was serviceable, I could not see how to execute it on
time in and budget, and it had some non-period items. So I scrapped it and
started from scratch. The meat that had been purchased was $75 worth of pot
roast beef and chicken dark quarters. Here I believe inexperience crated a
problem because the meat was purchased in early April and put in the freezer
in it's original Styrofoam/saran wrap containers. Needless to say it was all
freezer burned beyond my ability to salvage. This takes my budget down to
$300.
I decided that good meat (and my reputation) was worth the effort so my
husband and I chipped in to buy new meat and found chicken at $.30 a pound
and pork at $.99 a pound - all total we spent about $45. But if I had to
take that out of the $300  there would not have been much left for the other
dishes.
I stuck with the original feast format, an opening course, one big main
course and a closing course for ease of service and then started going
through my existing recipes and the Florithingie. The results were:

First Course:
Bread
Epitrium (an Olive relish)
Fresh Cheese
Grapes
Sweet Oranges (peeled in one long spiral, taken apart into segments and then
reassembled and wrapped back in the skin - justifying one per table)

Second Course:
Grave of Chicken (Menagier)
Cormarye
Cariota (roasted carrots in vinaigrette with rosemary and thyme)
Turnips in Mustard Sauce (thank you Anahita and Stefan!)
Mushroom Tart (Menagier)
Salat

Third Course:
Shrewsbury Cakes
Sweet Wafers
Peaches in Wine Compote

The first and third course were entirely preprepared, so we only had to deal
with the second course on site. It made the week(s) before a pain but the
day of much easier. We cooked the tarts on the grill thanks to the magic of
Borgar's grill handling and they came out wonderful, sacrificing only one to
the Grill Gods.
Everything went swimmingly and I believe everyone ate well, there were no
complaints. I even had some time to play around with the great deal of
leftover garlic I had for some reason. I was sitting with the staff in a
lull and they started talking like we should make a garlic sauce to go with
everything. So I made it up. I ended up with a sauce that contained: Garlic,
grains of paradise, long pepper, beef broth and bread crumbs. It was not for
the faint of heart and I sent a server around to offer it to the brave.
Apparently it was pretty good and went well with both the pork and the
mushroom tart. ;)

OK, I am sure this has been entirely too long. Hopefully I will now have my
life back and return to my normal reading of the cooks list!

Glad Tidings,
Serena da Riva