[Sca-cooks] medieval boil-in bag meals

Michael Gunter countgunthar at hotmail.com
Thu Aug 16 08:30:17 PDT 2007


>what recipes DON'T work with boiling bags? :). Any sort of stew thing 
>works.
>Herbolades work. Sauces work. Braised greens. Benes. Frumenty. Funges.
>Basically any dish that you would have boiled, or simmered into a glop, so
>pretty much most of the English and French medieval corpus ;).

As has been pointed out, you can do more than just gloppy dishes. One
of my camp favorites is breakfast burritos. Just make the burritos ahead of
time, wrap and seal. Then drop in boiling water to reheat.
Noodles do fine in seal-a-meals. The first time I sealed spaghetti noodles
I thought they had been squashed to mush. But when they were heated
and poured into a bowl they were fine.

Grilled meats do fine. Steaks and chops do great.
Remember, no water gets into the bag. Just heat penetrates so it is like
a microwave. I've even put in frozen microwave items (like Beef Stroganoff)
and then just used the boiling bag and it worked fine.

Seal-A-Meals are also great for raw foods that you want to marinate.
The vaccuum seal helps the marinade penetrate deeply. Just unseal and
grill.

So pretty much any period dish works well when sealed. Just prepare at
home and boil on site. Pour into your serving dish and have a proper dinner
with no grey water, no dirty pots and very little cleanup.

>I've even done roast pork with sace by making the sauce ahead of time,
>roasting the pork at home, sliceing the pork and packaging WITH the sauce
>and reheating on site.

Yeah. That works fine.
Also, fresh stuff is great. Salads, sliced vegetables (even things like 
tomato
or avacado) cheeses, raw meats or fish, etc....the sealing prevents 
oxidation
and cross contamination. It also prevents water from melting ice to get in
or meat juices from getting out.

The frozen flat bags also help keep the chill in a cooler.

>Again, I vastly prefer to cook in a period manner, but when modern site
>rules dictate, I have come up with this work around :)

My main reason for using the Seal-A-Meal is convenience. I'm almost always
busy at events or Wars but I'm also quite often the main camp cook along
with Elizabeth. I just flat don't have TIME to go and prepare a nice dinner
for even two people after fighting all day, sitting in Circle, attending 
Commanders'
meetings, working A&S or whatever. So, I can come in, take a shower, get
changed and boil some water for a nice hot meal before going to Court or
whatever else calls.

Yes, preparing a meal in a period fashion is wonderful. But you usually have 
to
dedicate a couple of hours to doing it. I just never have that luxury.

Um....have I mentioned that I LOVE my Seal-A-Meal?

>--Anne-Marie

Yers

Gunthar

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