[Sca-cooks] cooking large feasts outside

[Stefan li Rous]

In many ways this reminds me of the cooking done for the Ansteorran 
25th Year Celebration done this last July. There was no kitchen inside 
the feast hall. While the hall was air conditioned, the outside 
definitely was not.

They set up the kitchen in tents across the parking lot and had a 
number of outside burners and grills. I think a lot of the feast was 
pre-cooked elsewhere. The water was delivered by hoses attached to 
outside water faucets.

One of the things which I thought was the most useful was that they 
rented a refrigerated trailer. The kind which are used to deliver 
frozen and refrigerated foods to groceries and parked it on the parking 
lot, hooked up power and used that as their cold storage.

I happened to do only a bit of prep work and washing in the kitchen the 
afternoon before the feast and was not involved in the logistics, but 
it was run by Mistress Clarissa who was recently the Seneschal for 
Ansteorra and I can get you contact info or more details if you wish.

Admittedly there are going to be some differences between cooking an 
outside feast in July in the middle of Ansteorra and one in January in 
the middle of the East Kingdom :-), but there are some similarities as 
well.

Stefan
> Hey! Give us a chance!  It's going to be in a commercial kitchen just
> 5 feet outside the building!  No need to bad mouth us yet!
>
> Grace
>
> In a message dted 11/21/2004 8:54:55 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> ekoogler1 at comcast.net writes:
>
> I  believe that they do plan to cook part of it ahead of time, but it
> still  has all of the earmarks of pending disaster.  It's one thing to
> cook  a modest-sized feast for a nrmal, local event...or even something
> like a  Crown Tourney...under these conditions.  But it's quite another
> to  cook a major event like Twelfth Night like this.  In the past, the
> feast has been done to feed as many as 400...and it's usually a feast
> thatfeatures fancy dishes.  So trying to do this in a tent in early
> January will be quite difficult.  We're keeping an open mind at this
> point, but are considering going off board.
>
> Kiri

--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          
StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****