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A few more details on the cook's 14^th century playdate this weekend.

• John's bringing spit adapters for the BBQs at the park
• Janos is bringing his monster BBQ
• Zinaida's bringing her oven on a trailer
• Gianetta's bringing oil for frying
• Crystal's bringing a krumkaka iron for wafers.  

If you can, feel free to bring wood or hardwood charcoal. I hope to get the fire started before 10am. I expect we'll cook all afternoon until about 5pm. We'll eat as we go, and we're going to be listed in the site handout, so be nice to the folks who wander by for a snack. :)

We're also going to have some musicians, at least one group of singers for the 14^th century salon, and a discussion of the Story of Patient Griselda see link in comments for discussion questions, and go here http://www.bartleby.com/195/2.html and here http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/clkt-par.htm for the texts)

I'm hoping we'll have a dishwashing station, and a place to sit and eat out of the smoke. I'll have 5 gals of drinking water available.

If you can, please bring a clipboard and pen. Juana is bringing some extra ingredients and recipes (and I hope to have some too), so if you decide to cook one up, please write down your recipes/experiments.

At least one person as asked for oven space for bread. I'd like to bake a tart.

Details about Mists Coronet: http://mists.westkingdom.org/2009_Fall_Coronet.php

Welcome to Canada

This past week, GM and I went to Canada to attend the Known World Dance Symposium. On the way, we stopped in Toronto to visit the museums, and in Stratford for the Shakespeare festival.

Toronto is one heckuva nice town. The streetcars move along in the center of the streets, so the drivers in the right-hand turn lanes have to pause while people get on and off the streetcars. In Boston, this would result in pedestrian pizza; but in Toronto the drivers just stop, well before they come alongside the bus. I think there must be tranquilizers in the water supply.
The Royal Ontario Museum has a lot of SCA-appropriate armor, and a full set of fruit trenchers! They don’t have any images on their website, so I need to write to the curator. (note to self, Dessert Trenchers with Storage Box English late 1500s 961.232.25a-n). Matt tried to take some pictures for me, but we haven't got them off the camera yet.
The Art gallery of Ontario seemed like it would be entirely modern, so we only went there because many of Toronto's other features were closed due to a city worker strike. It was fortunate, partly because the exhibit on surrealism was quite cool, and because in the basement was a large collection of medieval objects of ivory and wood. The big score was a Set of Carving Knives, around 1350 France (paris) ivory, steel, silver, leather case 107455. Happily the shop had a book with a good picture. I must remember to scan it and send it to the knife boys.
Should you ever travel to Toronto, I strongly recommend eating at Cava.  The owner was described by Gourmet magazine as a defiant charcutièrist, and our dinner of tapas inspired food was amazing.

We arrived in Stratford on Canada Day. Fortunately not everything was closed so we got some lunch and wandered around the town. There was a small fair going on in the main square, so we watched some dance demonstrations (clogging, mostly) and ate a deep-fried Mars Bar before going to see Julius Caesar. I liked the production, and was amused by the fact the actor playing Caesar was the same actor who played Henry Breedlove (MacBeth) in season two of Slings and Arrows. In the evening we saw Bartholomew Faire, which was somewhat frantic but quite funny. The next day we saw The Importance of Being Ernest, one of my very favorite plays in the whole world. The people playing Algernon, Cecily and Lady Bracknell were all quite wonderful, and Miss Prism was delightfully stern. The actor playing Rev. Canon Chasuble was also in Slings and Arrows as the ghost of Oliver. There are things I would do in the staging of TIoBE that they did not do, but what they did do was very good.

We didn't really see much of Hamilton, other than a few restaurants and the edge of campus where we were staying.
The Known World Dance Symposium was excellent. I took several classes on the Gresly manuscript, all of which were quite interesting. I need to look at the manuscript again and see if my impression that Gresley is closely related to the Brussels manuscript is correct. I also did several new-to-me Playford dances including A la Mode de France, Whish, and an interestingly different reconstruction of Faine I Would. GM and I also took classes to learn some new cascardas (Alta Regina and Maraviglia d'Amore), I hope we'll be able to teach them to the local group.

Some of you might remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about making the bacon explosion. I tried a variant on it last night, in hopes of making something that was tasty but would only kill us slowly.
1 12-oz package of applewood bacon from Trader Joe’s
1 1-pound-ish pork loin
about 8 garlic cloves, sliced paper-thin
about 1/4 a bottle of Mo's Philthy Phil's barbeque sauce
about a tablespoon of a commercial Creole blend (can't remember what kind, it's in a green paper "can")

Weave bacon mat, sprinkle with Creole seasoning and garlic chips. Drizzle with bbq sauce. Place pork loin at edge of mat, and roll up. Sprinkle with more Creole seasoning and drizzzelw ith more bbq sauce. Place on pan, and bake at 400F for about 45 minutes or until an insta-read thermometer pushed into the end reaches no less than 145F, preferably 165F.

I think the pan may be unsalvageable. The lumps of cooked bacon grease and bbq sauce are impressive. Next time, I might place the log on a rack over the pan, as the bottom was not as crispy as I'd like. It was pretty good while warm, we'll see what it's like as leftovers.

Waiting for files to finish downloading is one of the most boring aspects of my job. That, and installing/uninstalling/reinstalling the product over and over again.

I'm going to make some lasagnas this weekend. I need to take one to my BrotherInLaw Rik when we go to visit him next weekend, so I'm going to do the sausage experiment I've been putting off. I've explored most of the lasagna parameters, but I've neglected variations on the meat layer. The last batch, which turned out very well, contained Italian sausages from the Tasty Salty Pig Parts People. I can't get those for this weekend, sadly they have no retail outlet, so I'm going to try some chicken/basil/sundried tomato sausages from Schaub's Meat Fish and Poultry. I got another kind of sausage from them, but I can't remember what it is now. I'll get some Hot Italian Sausage from Dittmer's and perhaps I'll check the meat counter at Whole Foods too. I've never made a lasagna with chicken sausage before, I hope it works as it would make feeding the nonporky people easier.

Yes, "making lasgane" means making 6-9 pans of lasagne. I have a big freezer.

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