SC-Outlandish-msg - 8/24/08 Review of a pirate themed Siege Cooking competition at the 2008 Outlandish event. NOTE: See also the files: cookg-compet-msg, AS-compet-msg, pirates-lnks, pirates-msg, boat-building-msg, stews-bruets-msg, turnips-msg, Outl-hist-msg. ************************************************************************ NOTICE - This file is a collection of various messages having a common theme that I have collected from my reading of the various computer networks. Some messages date back to 1989, some may be as recent as yesterday. This file is part of a collection of files called Stefan's Florilegium. These files are available on the Internet at: http://www.florilegium.org I have done a limited amount of editing. Messages having to do with separate topics were sometimes split into different files and sometimes extraneous information was removed. For instance, the message IDs were removed to save space and remove clutter. The comments made in these messages are not necessarily my viewpoints. I make no claims as to the accuracy of the information given by the individual authors. Please respect the time and efforts of those who have written these messages. The copyright status of these messages is unclear at this time. If information is published from these messages, please give credit to the originator(s). Thank you, Mark S. Harris AKA: THLord Stefan li Rous Stefan at florilegium.org ************************************************************************ Date: Sun, 25 May 2008 19:03:25 -0600 From: "Kathleen A Roberts" Subject: [Sca-cooks] siege cooking at outlandish - update To: SCA-Cooks at ansteorra.org well, the rainy and windy weather (hail last Thursday night, but it did keep the dust down) made connor and i decide to daytrip for the siege cooking on Saturday for me, and general schmoozing for him. he had the better time. it was 36 degrees at 8 a.m., warm and sunny all day. extreme fire conditions, so nada but propane. the scenario: with a seafaring/pirate theme, the team (3 cooks and 1 scullery) had to prepare two meals, one for the crew at 3:45 (in town hall) and one for the captain and guests at 4:30 at the team's campsite). staggered times for four teams. we began first, at 8:30. all four teams met at town square at 8 a.m. the coordinator was late. we then learned that each team of cooks had to basically go through a guided scavenger hunt to get the food. we were given a few basics in a bucket, but otherwise it was long distance hiking shopping. (note: if you were disabled or rickety in some way, you could have a designated walker assigned. all directions and rules were given to the teams at that time. i had emailed the coordinator to ask (if permissible) how many judges, so the team could have enough plateage. she emailed me EIGHT! i forwarded it to the team - we almost quit then. despite slightly bad knees, i didn't think i needed the designated walker, and forged on with my captain, one-eye emma and fellow cook, zee spenyerd (OLE!) ). we didn't have a chance to look into our bucket to see what we had, being the first boat out, but it looked pretty usual... oats, flour, honey. oh, yes... and we had to do it all traveling in a BOAT of pvc pipe in an elongated pentagon shape, that we had to hold up with our hands. all travel required all three persons be in the 'boat', holding it up. during your voyage from place to place you could be raided by the pyrates, and they could take your provisions if you did not have sufficient bribes. the other boats could raid you if you passed. you had to ask permission to dock at ports, but had to stay at respectable distance if another ship was already there. but wait, there's more..... so our team sets sail for the pyrate camp first, thinking it furthest from our camp, that we would go there and double back to the ports on the way to camp. we got to the pyrate camp, and only three people were awake, and had no idea what was going on. we were advised to come back when everyone was awake. so.... we hit the other ports of call where we got our provisions. my bribes of song and/or homemade oatmeal/almond,raisin/cranberry cookies got us some other goods, as did emma's glass beads, but not especially useful in the end. but, hold the phone... we go back to the pyrate camp (the farthest port from our camp) about an hour later to be told that the captain had given all of the provisions to the first boat there, early bird, worms and all that. we informed him WE were first there and no one knew what was going on. he said, well i wasn't awake yet. grrrrrrrrrr...... fortunately, a friendly pyrate, and great inventor, gave us a bottle of dead man's ale (complete with little plastic skeleton in the bottle). extremely miffed, we sailed away to camp, needless to say, bitching all the way. and then.... we complained to the siege cooking coordinator who had no idea what was going on. we later found out other teams had been dismissed by the pyrates similarly. soldiering on... we checked our provisions. we had packets of seeds in them. (insert scooby doo bewilderment noise here). we were supposed to barter at a certain port of call for extra veggies. BUT - no one told anyone that. we found that out later. off in the boat again.... now mind you... the scenario called for two meals in 8 hours, or rather 6 hours (cuz it took us two hours to make the rounds to get the provisions) for an unknown number of crew at town hall (oh, just put down whatever dishes you want, or as a buffet) and 45 minutes later dinner for 8 in captains quarters, we had... about a cup of flour 4 cups of oatmeal 2 cups barley (not prepped or hulled or anything) three leeks (one of them bribed) a quarter cup of coffee beans (bribed) 4 tomatoes 1 pineapple (!) 1 round watermelon a 3 inch round of goat cheese with cracked pepper a 2 inch block of gruyere 1 and a half cups of diced figs (coated with unidentifiable powdery spice stuff - at first we wondered why we had been given purina dog chow, cuz that was what it looked like in the baggie) a cup of milk one onion one pound of carrots three hardtack biscuits one half cup of spiced rum (bribed) 1 bottle of ale (bribed) 6 eggs 1 cup of milk handful of salt handful of black peppercorns (thank god for the crab mallet) two apples (gotten by my charm and guile) a vanilla bean a quarter cup of olive oil a quarter cup of distilled white vinegar a generous quarter cup of honey a generous half cup of raw sugar a piece of beef round, about the size of two ladies fists put together a sandwich sized zip lock bag of beef jerky two HUGE turnips two tablespoons of dill seed (!) a bottle of mead no citrus, no salt pork, no wine/brandy, no rum... (i strongly suspect there were salad greens somewhere as we later found a bag of mesclun seeds in the bottom of the bucket) and an hour later, to make up for the confusion at the pyrate camp.... a piece of smoked venison the size of my hand and less than an inch thick then someone said they were coming to take some of our meat because of a mix-up. fortunately, no one was chopping at the time, but we convinced them we weren't the people who were supposed to be giving up meat. and one hour later, ditto above four pork spare ribs i think that was it. its a bit of a blur now. i know this is supposed to get your creativity going, but... one eyed emma set to making a beef stew for the captain's table. zee spenyerd (OLE !) used his blade skills to full advantage, chopping and slicing. bones the teenage scullery lad kept the pots and pans coming. i was hoping for jerky cuz i had a good recipe for breaking it down into a neat gravy to put over just about anything (chuckwagon cookbook). unfortunately, it was not the dry, preserved jerky you find in some good jerky shops, but the sticky, almost teriaki sweet jerky you get in bags at the truckstops, both thin and gobbet sized. let me say, that emma and i were exhausted by the time we started, with all the hiking. all of us worked away as best we could, and two hours before the time to feed the crew, we were staring at each other with glazed over eyes. this being rosalio's (zee spenyard (OLE !) ) first siege cooking experience, he was pretty much game for anything. we had our notebook, we had ideas, but there just wasn't enough of anything to do as much as we needed to do, even with little tastes. the jerky wouldn't reconstitute. the rum was spiced (ICK!). what do you do with 4 spareribs 3 hours into the competition, and a pineapple, fer gawd's sake? sadly, and after much discussion, we decided that we did not have the energy for the task at hand, and threw in our pirate bandanas. neither emmaline or i give up easily, and it was a hard thing to do, but it was beyond us. as we were getting ready to go to the coordinators camp, a fellow team captain came to our camp to see if we had stolen her flag and provisions. (all teams had a flag to show judges where they were.) apparently some one had taken the raiding theme too far, and well into the competition time, as she was about to make a dish, discovered her eggs and milk were missing. (we gave her what was left of ours.) after four hours of hard work, we had a passable beef stew, a pork/leek/apple dish that would not have served six a tablespoon let alone 8, an authentic dish of hardtack broken up and stewed with rum and sugar (that had the figs added to kill the weird spiced rum taste) and a nice little wrap of apple slice spread with goat cheese and wrapped with finely sliced smoked venison, and the rest of the flotsam and jetsam mocking us on the table. oh, and a 'personal' judge came by every two hours to see how we were doing, check on our teamwork and test us on our pyrate trivia. extra points for documentation or real pyrate recipes. he was a sweetie, and thought some of the rules were crazy too, and actually gave us some 'sympathy' chocolate for our experience with the pyrates/protein. it was sad. the coordinator was shocked we surrendered our flag. it was supposed to be fun, and she was sorry we were not having fun with it. if we hadn't had to lug those boats around every time we went somewhere, if there weren't so many mouths to feed, such disjointed provisions (i am used to odd, but this was WIERD), if there weren't confusion about what and who could be "messed with", then fine. but it wasn't worth it. at noon, my husband stopped by and told both of us we already looked exhausted and maybe this wasn't worth it. being stubborn, we insisted it wasn't that bad. it got old really quickly. i am not a quitter but in retrospect i really think it was the best thing. we left early, i don't even know now how many teams finished or who won with what. i really didn't care. the team was great all around, and bones was blessing for toting within the camp, and zee spenyerd's (OLE !) knife skills are incredible. our personal judge told us that with some of the things he was hearing from us, including the pyrating of eggs and milk, he was going off to have a talk with the coordinators. he visited us after we surrendered, and was rather sympathetic. nice young viking gent. we had fun with each other -- we would shout OLE! every time one of us said "zee spenyerd" and were going to put the skeleton in the crew's mess -- but the competition was no fun. future siege cooking coordinators, learn from this. it's about cooking, not about cool, complicated and confusing themes. KISS! cailte Date: Mon, 26 May 2008 06:49:27 -0400 From: Johnna Holloway Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] siege cooking at outlandish - update To: Cooks within the SCA Thanks for the lengthy detailed report. It sounds rather confused at best. I wonder if the coordinators have been watching too much reality tv. I can't imagine spending most of the cooking time having to scavenge for ingredients before you cook. Maybe you should have hired a crew to just raid a camp or two for what they had available and cooked that. Pyrates and all. I do hope that you took the rest of the weekend off. Johnnae Kathleen A Roberts wrote: <<< future siege cooking coordinators, learn from this. it's about cooking, not about cool, complicated and confusing themes. KISS! cailte >>> Edited by Mark S. Harris SC-Outlandish-msg Page 6 of 6