[Sca-cooks] Potrero seige contest

[Bj Jane Tremaine]

This years Siege cooking contest at Petrero really stretched my House Holds'
(House of the Blackened Pot) cooking expertise and speed. We were to make as
many dishes as we could with the ingredients given.  Set in 1201, in the
Baltic.  Most of our recopies came from either experience in the Kitchen or
a Polish cookbook one of the ladies had.

Our ingredients were
a whole roasting chicken
a smoked duck leg
2 smoked sausages
2 meaty ham hocks
1 lamb shank
really nice bacon
smoked neck pork bones
and dried cod(like a board)
6 eggs
1 gallon of whole milk
lard
wallnut oil
dark beer
light beer(I would have swore from taste it was a dry mead)
hibiscus water
elderberry juice
red wine
apple cider vinegar
traveling sauce
honey
rye flower
wheat flower
barley flower
rolled barley
split peas
almonds
filberts
walnuts
1 head of cabbage
3 carrots
3 small onions
2 parsnips
3 beats
2 turnips
1 rutabaga
dried back currents
dried apples
dried cherries
dried elderberries
dried figs
juniper berries
prunes
dried mushrooms
salt
peppercorns
mustard
horseradish
candid ginger
powdered ginger
cinnamon sticks
powdered cinnamon
mace
fennel
and two other spices that for the life of me I can not remember their names.
One is the shell of whole mace and the other is a small black seed.I may be
missing an item or two, I am not sure.  Selene may remeber, she was a judge.

If there is a large C in front of the dish, that came out of the Polish
cookbook we used.

We turned in 14 dishes.
Chicken soup, split pea soup with bacon and the ham hock bones,  a barley
fruit compote,  C a split pea and barley compote, roasted lamb shank with
traveling sauce, barley bread with fruit sauce, heathen peas(came from a
different cook book), spiced wine, C  hydromel drink, C roasted chicken over
veggies and prunes, stuffed chicken breast browned in bacon drippings, a
fish sultatie(SP) stuffed with the fish soaked overnight in milk then boiled
in milk till soft in a milk and mushroom sauce, C a meat loaf dish made of
the pork neck meat and ham hock meat with black currents and a quiche made
of sausage, eggs and black currents in a rye flower crust.

We had two large camp stoves and 6 cast iron pots to bake in.

We took best presentation, were handicapped on amount of dishes(we turned in
as many dishes as all of the other teams combined) and the meat loaf got
honorable mention for best dish.  We had for most of the day 5 of us cooking
and in the end 6.  With a seventh doing the presentation layout.  There were
a total of 5 teams

It was quite a workout.

THLady Jana Aoibeall
CAID, Calafia, Blackenpot, Drafn