[Sca-cooks] Pinch-hitting (was pasties)

[Stefan li Rous]

Serena replied to me with:
> > I hope that Serena will give us a feast report. I had saved your
> > earlier feast preview and was waiting to hear the results for a
> > Florilegium feast report article.
>
> I am not certain I can give a good report as far as the feast, I had
> such a tenuous grasp on what was going on I do not know if I could
> reliably report what went on. ;)

Well, can you tell which dishes didn't get produced? Or the dishes  
that had to be converted into something else because of logistics  
problems or otherwise? Can you say which dishes you liked the best?  
Or those that you might do differently the next time? Or whether you  
had to shift some foods from their originally published courses to  
others?

> > Oooph. If I can get a good report on how she overcame these various
> > problems it might be a good addition to my fst-disasters-msg file  
> and
> > give folks some ideas of what can happen and how they might recover
> > from them.
>
> This I can try to do, and will do so after this weekend (Crown List).
> But I do not think I would classify it as a disaster.

Okay, perhaps the name of my file (fst-disasters-msg) is a bit  
misleading. For that file I'm not looking for feasts that turned out  
to be disasters. I can find plenty of those that happen even when the  
cooks had the best of facilities. I'm looking for examples of how  
feasts that should have been disasters because of multiple things,  
usually outside of the headcooks control, are instead, wonderful feasts.

> I think that
> Lonnie's planning and organization made it possible for me to step in
> and run a fairly smooth kitchen. But I will write it up and let you be
> the judge!

Please do. Admittedly, Lonnie may be getting all his reports  
secondhand and there may be some exaggeration involved. But it sounds  
like you had multiple problems come up, and yet you pulled it off.

I don't know if anyone ever reads the file, but my purpose for  
creating that file is to give cooks, especially new headcooks, some  
ideas on what problems have occurred at other feasts so they can be  
more prepared ahead of time and to get them thinking about what might  
come up. Also, to perhaps give some encouragement so that if they are  
feeling overwhelmed, they can see that others have done wonderful  
feasts under even more serious problems than they think they have.

Stefan
--------
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 ****