[Sca-cooks] Blessed are the non-cooks

Audrey Bergeron-Morin audreybmorin at gmail.com
Wed Feb 13 19:31:42 PST 2008


> Anybody who is willing to come in and deal with things when I am 
> brainfried
> and tired is SO BLESSED.

Well, thank you :-) The local cooks' guild must thinks so too since they 
gave me an offical apron and offered me to join...

It all started a few years ago. I started by being on the serving team, then 
I ended up washing dishes a few times - I'm friends with a lot of our 
Barony's cooks - in awful conditions. The worst time was when all we had was 
one sponge (given to us by one of the feasters) and two towels to clean a 
whole feast's worth of dishes.

I decided then and there that I would take over the washing part so we would 
never, ever be stuck like that again. So, as soon as the last course goes 
out on the tables, I grab a mouthful and leave the putting away to my Lord, 
and sneak into the kitchen. I put the leftovers out on the serving tables 
with assorted ziplock bags and plastic containers (I collect margarine, 
yoghurt and other pots that would otherwise go into the recycling bin), put 
out a big pot of soapy water for people to wash their dishes when there's no 
sink for that purpose, grab a good voice to tell everybody to get what they 
want, and start washing. Usually somebody shows up and takes care of the 
putting away of the leftovers. By that time I'm usually deep into the 
washing part :-)

I have put together a wonderful kitchen cleanup box. Plastic bags (including 
heavy-duty extra-large trash bags), sponge towels, assorted sponges and 
scrubbies, steel wool, dish soap, dry bleach tablets (never got to use them 
because we never have an extra sink for the rinsing), bottle brush (handy 
for washing strainers), kitchen gloves (don't use them but I have them just 
in case), about 25 dish cloths that I take out ONE AT A TIME (I know if I 
take them out all at the same time they'll all be wet within 10 minutes), 
even rope, scissors, elastics, hand moisturizer, nail clipper, pen and 
paper, bandages, and many other things... and the lid of the box is concave, 
so I use it as a drip mat.

And the cooks know I have the box with me, so they can ask for specific 
items during the day...

I guess I just found a niche that needed to be filled and I decided to do a 
decent job of it :-)

It just kills me to see the cooks who've put in work for months before the 
event, have often not slept much the whole week before and sometimes not at 
all the previous night, and cooked all day and all evening, and often not 
even eaten during the cooking part, sitting in the kitchen just watching the 
piles of dirty dishes... The best part is when I have enough hands and can 
simply shoo them out of the kitchen because they're "in the way" :-) 



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