Purim

[cellio]

The event went well, from what I saw. People seemed to be having fun, we got entries for both the brewing and illusion-food contests, I Genesii did a great take on the Purim story, and people ate the food. There were about 20 no-shows, which I didn't know until late in the day, which explains some of the food excess. Not all of it; for some things either I over-estimated or I just plain didn't know how much people would eat.

I'm told the head-count was 94. This was a buffet, not a served feast. Here are some notes on the food.

Chicken soup: uninteresting. I think they ate about one gallon, total. Not worth the hassle.

Lentils with onions: I made three bags (six cups, dry); there were almost none left. This surprised me.

Fried spinach: it turned out to be impossible to get fresh spinach; I tried three stores. Bagged is expensive, so I had less than I'd planned (I had about three and a half pounds). It all went, and pretty quickly. This, too, surprised me.

Beef pies: they ate nine or ten over the course of a few hours (I had fourteen), but several people asked for leftovers to take home.

Hard-boiled eggs: the rule of thumb I'd been given was "one per person plus a dozen (for breakage)". One per person who actually showed up turned out to be about right.

Apples (mostly) and pears (some) (quartered): mostly went. About eight pounds total, I think (I forget the bag weight).

Dried fruits: used three pounds of apricots, two of prunes, and one of raisins.

Olives: got five pounds; I think about two-thirds went.

Stuffed grape leaves: one five-pound tin went pretty quickly.

Pickles: probably used the equivalent of two grocery-store large jars (as opposed to the mega-jars from the warehouse club). What can you do with leftover pickles?

Bread: Alastar and his crew were producing fresh-baked bread all day. They used a variety of recipes. I have no data on quantities. I do know that trays of fresh, hot bread often failed to make it all the way to the buffet table before being depleted, but at the end we had some left. He had said that for $30 in ingredients (and propane) I'd get more bread than I needed.

Smoked salmon: I think we used about twelve pounds.

Cabbage stew: I started with nine heads of cabbage (which cooked down somewhat); I think they ate half to two-thirds of it.

Rice: four cups dry would have been fine.

Roasted chicken: they raved about this, and all we did was apply olive oil, rosemary, and some salt and pepper and roast it.

Roasted veggies: four or five pounds of carrots, two or three of parsnips, about two of turnips, and six or eight large yellow onions, drizzled with olive oil, thyme, and salt. Forgot about one bowl of these (found it in the dumbwaiter a couple hours later). Pretty popular, but not immediately.

White beans: (Cooked with onion, garlic, and some spices I'll have to look up.) This was a cold dish (by design). They ate some but not a lot.

Fish pies: these were labor-intensive but went over very well. We used about ten pounds of tilapia; seven would have been fine (but all the leftovers got taken home). We managed to find frozen bread dough that was parve and had a pizza recipe on the back (strongly implying that it could be rolled flat), so we used that. Actually rolling it out posed challenges; the secret seemed to be to roll it out somewhat, let it sit for ten or fifteen minutes, and then roll it out more. Trying to do it all at once didn't work too well.

Meatballs: they ate about four pounds' worth, I think.

Goat stew: I had no idea how people would react to goat; it could have been anywhere from "you want me to eat what?" to "ooh, something new!". It turned out to be closer to the latter. We had about 25 pounds of goat, though a lot of that was bone and fat. Most of it went.

Eggplant stuffed with fruit: we made four eggplants; I think they ate two and a half.

Green salad: Alastar was right; one bag of lettuce is enough for a feast.

Roasted garlic: tasty, but I think we needed to actually squeeze out the cloves instead of expecting people to do it themselves.

Chickpeas with onions and honey: aborted; it didn't look like we needed more legumes, so I didn't make them.

Hulvah: I think they ate about a pound.

Almond cookies: eh.

Hamantashen (made by lorimelton): went pretty quickly. I'm not sure how many she made -- four dozen or so?

Sugared walnuts (a surprise present): I think they ate about a quart or quart and a half.

I did not do a lot of cooking myself during the day (though I did a lot of prep beforehand). I was, instead, mostly directing other people; I was fortunate to have a lot of help, but I didn't always have a sense of how long a task would take. (Making the fish pies and peeling hard-boiled eggs took longer; cutting up fruit and preparing chicken went faster.) I had prepared a schedule for the day in advance, but found myself improvising a fair bit. (Oh -- someone's available now. Sure, let's go ahead and chop those veggies; they'll keep.) I was doing a poor job of tracking what was going on in the basement, which meant some food was ready ahead of schedule (they put it into the oven as soon as they had it; I failed to tell them otherwise). So this turned into a "food comes out when it's ready" buffet instead of the three distinct courses I'd planned.

The site: we were at the castle, the new home of two of our members. The kitchen is a decent household kitchen, with typical household appliances. The "period kitchen" is a tower room with a working fireplace and some work tables; we used it for prep, storage, staging, and two roasters. (Roaster location was dictated by the circuit layout.)

What made this menu possible was Alastar deciding he wanted to test out his bakery equipment before Gulf Wars next week, so he brought two large propane-fueled ovens. In addition to the bread we used them for the chicken, roast veggies, meat pies, fish pies, and eggplant. He also brought along a couple sinks, I think (or maybe we just used the utility sinks in the basement; I didn't look closely). Washing dishes in the kitchen sink would have been impractical due to both size and needing the workspace for prep. Without Alastar's equipment, I would have had to prepare a very different menu.

Because we had people working in the basement and in the kitchen, communication was a little tricky (we used runners). Only at the end of the event did anyone think to use cell phones for this. (I'd been speculating that their dumbwaiter needed a bell; sometimes we used it to send something to the other space, but unless the delivery was expected no one knew to go look.)

Alastar's equipment made this possible, but it's also a lot of work to get it there (and back again) and set up. I don't think he's going to offer this for most events.

As we were cleaning up the autocrat shared something scary she'd heard: several people told her they're looking forward to coming to this event next year. :-) I thought it was a one-shot niche event; can it sustain interest if we do it again? Well, we don't have to decide now.

This event was also an experiment in another way. I won't work for an event that charges the corporate tax, so this was a donation-funded event with a fee for the food. Most of our free events are at free sites and have pot-luck food; this event had costs (we had to rent tables and chairs, mainly) and we weren't sure if people would see a fee and just pay that without reading the announcement to see that that was just for food. Results: $225 in expenses, $268 in donations. Good; that demonstrates that this model can in fact work in this group. With luck the officers will be open to doing it again. (They were rather reluctant to accept this event bid, though obviously they did in the end. I basically promised them that this event would not lose money and they accepted it based on my (and the autocrat's) personal clout.)

Comments

[cellio]

Yup. This particular goat was not (it did not come from a kosher butcher); I made a lamb version on the side for folks who care. But yes, goat is a kosher species. So is deer, by the way; it's just that the usual ways of acquiring deer render the instance non-kosher. (And, by the way, so is bison, which I have had a couple times on those rare occasions when my butcher has it.)

I'm a city kid, so "split hoof and chews the cud" wasn't particularly informative for me. I found a list. :-)

[magid.livejournal.com]

I can get both deer and bison at the kosher butcher, but I've yet to find goat. Someday...