[Sca-cooks] Regrettably Poor Royal Judgement

[Patricia Dunham]

>Congratulation, Giano. It's very well deserved ;-)
>
>For future eference, that's exactly why in most discussions of
>kitchens for feasts, we all suggest having someone with a clue inspect
>the kitchen first. Anything can be overcome, but it's a lot easier if
>you havce advance warning ;-)

Even so...  The state of the kitchen as inspected, and as received 
several weeks later may prove troublesome...  ca. 20 yrs ago my lord 
and I did a Kingdom 12th Night, autocratting as well as organizing 
the feast... we had two kitchens, both at church facilities.  We did 
look at them, and assigned the bulk of preparation to a deputy at the 
larger one, about 8 miles from the hall.  That operation went 
wonderfully, the deputy was a mundanely-trained professional. 
Transport was fun, but manageable.

The second, smaller kitchen was part of the hall facilities.  We did 
look at it.  We explained that we would be cooking, and as the person 
showing us around said nothing about any problem with the stove, we 
assumed it was in working order.  Apparently we were naive.  I guess 
we should have actually turned on all the burners, and brought our 
own oven thermometer and heated up the oven?  They also told us the 
refrigerator would be emptied out.

When we got there to do the on-site cooking, the refrigerator was 3 
times as full as it had been on inspection, and there was no one from 
the site available to deal with it.

And the stove turned out to have a malfunctioning oven, so the roast 
duck was taking twice as long as it was supposed to!

We finally managed to get access to a second stove, that was working 
-- in the rectory!, and limped through with the combination of both!

Not sorry to have THAT little surprise 20 years in the past!
Chimene