madbaker | good, but tiring SCA weekend

If you don't want to read about my SCA adventures this last weekend, such as they were, don't

Arts & Sciences is one of my all-time favorite events. Even lately, when I got roped into teaching two classes and I haven't felt much like teaching. The event has very little fighting (and no fighting tournaments, other than the kids' boffers). It's all about hands-on learning. Since I don't fight, I guess that's why I love the event. It has a shortage of stick-jocks and a surfeit of arty types.

The wife's class was well-attended; it was full, and so was the waiting list. I heard lots of good things about it. Book-binding is neat and unusual. If I didn't live with the expert, I would have been tempted to sign up.

There was a Laurel ceremony, and I heard someone say "A quarter of the camp is up there!" The lady in question was Laurelled for cooking; she asked me to be part of the ceremony. It's the first time that I had done this, so I was nervous. It went reasonably well, though - I kept mine short and tried to make it amusing while still talking about her achievements. I got chuckles so I think I succeeded. I did build in laughter pauses to my script (thank the actor training for that).

mastersantiago ran a Siege Cooking competition. This was the first time it had been run here.
The scenario: "You have been in a besieged town for two months. Supplies are getting low. Your fearless leader has decided to invite the oppositions leader and three of his companions to parley. You must stretch your cooking skills to the limit to give the impression that you have lots of food left and can hold out for as long as necessary."

You get a box of stuff and have a limited time to create a feast. So there are two goals: create lots of period, yummy food using most or all of your ingredients, and create an appearance of sumptuary goodness.

The curvy upstairs neighbor was responsible for us creating a team. "The Company of St. Teresa" was three cooking Laurels, and a Laurel who cooks. (I'm not meaning to be egotistical here; there is plenty of cooking talent, as the competition showed.) We also ended up pulling in four of the other five people in our encampment as scullery. We had over-extended and couldn't have finished (more or less) on time or as well without their help!

Lots of planning last week; we had decided to work from 15^th century French cookbooks, partly so we could use cheesy Fronch accents. Which we forgot to do - oh well. I'll spare most details of what we did, except a couple things that I'm very proud of. We made a "Decorated Rice" dish which we put into a sand castle mold, then put banners on the embattlements. A castle under siege and all that. We made sage water to rinse our guests' hands off before the meal started. Pine nut brittle with our mystery ingredient, sugared caraway seeds, that was incredible! (Luckily, since it came out nothing like we had planned...)

Oh, and we finished in first place. Nice. The best part, though - and I mean this sincerely - is not that we won; it's that eight teams of three people or more participated, making mostly medieval food.

stella_nordica and

farmount finished second, scoring a bare whisker behind us. And there was much, much food geeking that went on all Saturday night and Sunday morning. This may have done more for the cause of yummy medieval food in this area than almost anything else in the last five years.

So thanks for making it happen,

mastersantiago. It was a blast.