We had a very nice schola event this past Saturday at the baron and baroness' castle (hence the event name). The classes I went to were quite good, lunch was tasty (including a nice vegetarian soup), and the feast (cooked by illadore) was excellent.

We missed the first couple class sessions (it would take an awful lot for me to willingly miss Shabbat morning services...). The session that was just about to start when we got there didn't have anything that grabbed me (good stuff but topics I already knew); I wish I had noticed the last-minute addition of a battle-tactics class. I would have taken that for the novelty. But I didn't notice it so instead I ate lunch and talked with people.

Leifr and risiko gave a slide show on their trip to Scandinavia -- not the typical vacation pictures you might expect, but lots and lots of stuff from museums off the beaten path. It appears that in Scandinavia, like in the parts of Israel I visited, they are perfectly content to let people crawl around ancient ruins instead of protecting everything behind glass. That definitely enhances my experience of such sites. (In contrast, I remember visiting Plymouth Rock decades ago and being surprised to find that it was roped/walled off so you couldn't get near it. Also, that it was much smaller than I had imagined.)

After that I went to two cooking classes taught by a visitor from the Cleftlands (we had a bunch of people from Ohio, which isn't usual for us even though it's nearby). The first was on mustards and the second on sauces. Mustard might be worth getting a blender for; mmmm. :-) (A tip he gave: mustard seed can be gotten in quantity from Indian groceries. I wouldn't have thought of that.)

At dinner we sat and conversed with some visitors from Cleftlands. The feast, as I said, was excellent. It was all from Forme of Cury (except one sauce that was ~20 years later, Illadore told me) and it hit that rare combination of tasty and well-balanced and vegetarian-friendly (without short-changing the meat-eaters) and aesthetically pleasing and well-timed and a plausible re-creation. It had chicken with mustard sauce, roast beef (with sauces), tarts for ember day (cheese/onion pie, more or less), cheese, nuts, fruit, pickled vegetables, a salad of greens, peas, mushrooms, and more, with apple pie and gingerbread for dessert. We often eat well in this barony, but especially well this time.

This was a free event with a lunch and feast that cost money. I don't think we've tried that model before; we've had completely-free pot-luck events (usually though not always with a donations basket set out), and we've had events where there is a site fee and food fee (the usual event model). A (good) feast adds a lot to an event for me so I prefer that to pot-luck, but I also want us to do free events, so I'm glad to see this combination being tried. I wonder how we did on donations.

Tonight we hosted a pot-luck dinner for about a dozen SCA people. We declared the theme to be 14th-century English. We should have asked people to register their intent to make ember-day tarts; we had three. :-) All different and all tasty; this is certainly not a complaint. I was just surprised. (This happens to us. One time we declared the theme to be "once in a blue moon" and got half a dozen blueberry pies.)

As the hosts we provided the main course. I made sweet-and-sour fish, and because we had a vegetarian coming, I also made roasted and boiled chickpeas. Both went over well -- the fish surprisingly so since my haddock filets fell apart in the cooking so the presentation was off. But it still tasted good. And it turned out the vegetarian is actually a pescatarian, so the chickpeas weren't strictly necessary, but hey, people ate them (and I have enough for lunch a couple days this week).

One person brought beer bread, and explained that she had spent an evening at the Sharp Edge researching beers so she could choose an appropriate one. She ended up choosing a Sam Adams, but I didn't catch which one. The bread was tasty and I scored a small chunk from the leftovers. (I've actually been a little too aggressive in clearing out the bread etc before Pesach, so I can use this.)

We also had an onion soup (made with almond milk, not meat stock), rolls, a cheese pie (other than the ember-day tarts, I mean), and three desserts. There was the usual pot-luck issue of too much food overall, but everything was good and got eaten to significant degree. (I had anticipated that vegetables might be in short supply -- this isn't a strong theme in medieval English recipes -- and ate extra for lunch.)

The gathering was one of the highly-irregular get-togethers of a loose household. Once upon a time household dinners were roughly monthly, but in recent years that hasn't been happening and it's now very irregular. (Part of this is probably because the head of the household is in poor health. She did not attend today.) But it's a fun group of people to talk with and many of these people don't come to events often, so the dinners help keep folks connected. Almost everyone thanked us for having this, citing reasons along those lines. So maybe we've breathed a bit of life back into the tradition, and maybe someone (other than the person who seems to do more than her share of dinners) will pick it up and do another one in a few months.

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.

( food analysis )

Tonight I did a trial run of one of the recipes for the Purim event, a fish pie. The ones for the event will not all be as whimsical as this, but one probably will be.



(The tail "fins" slipped in cooking.) I'm not sure what to use for the eye. I'm thinking maybe a green grape (or half of one), but I didn't have any in the house.

I seem to have zero talent for pie crust. The first problem is that it was kind of tough (I mean even before baking); I understand that this means I kneaded it too long, but the line between "not yet one coherent ball of dough" and "over-kneaded" is, in that case, way too fine. As soon as it all held together I stopped.

I assume my problems rolling it out are related to this. I couldn't get it as thin as I wanted. It just wouldn't go, after a while. I suppose I should go looking for "pie crust 101" on Wikipedia or something.

Dani and I are part of an SCA group that holds roughly-monthly pot-luck dinners. (The group is called Peacemakers. I don't know why, actually; I wasn't there at the beginning.) This month was our turn to host; after we kicked around ideas for the theme based on geography, time period, season, and particular ingredients without finding anything that inspired, Dani came up with a fun idea.

The invitation: ( Read more... )

Rosh Hashana went well for me, but I don't find myself having a lot to say about it. There are some bits of the liturgy that particularly struck me, and maybe later I'll get my machzor (high-holy-day prayerbook) and post them.

Shabbat morning I got a phone call from that day's torah reader, saying that she couldn't get there due to flooded-out areas between her house and the synagogue. I feel bad for her because she spent time learning the portion and now she can't use it until this time next year. She felt bad for leaving us in the lurch, and I tried to reassure her that it was obviously not her fault.

The rabbi couldn't stay today, so I suspected this would mean we wouldn't have a torah service, but then I said "hey, I read this portion last year; I wonder...". With ten minutes available to me to answer that question, I pulled out the tikkun and scraped the rust off of enough to make a valid torah reading. I wasn't going to be able to do all of it with that amount of time, but so long as you do at least three verses you can read torah. And I was able to do that, because (IMO) Ha'azinu is one of the easiest torah portions out there, and I'd done it before. When I got to shul I asked someone else to lead that part of the service and a third person to read the haftarah portion, because I didn't want to just take over myself. Remember those words; they'll be relevant later.

I mentally composed a d'var torah while walking to shul -- so it wasn't as polished as it might have been under better circumstances, but it was passable. I talked about the season and not the parsha directly. As my rabbi pointed out last week, this season is characterized by t'shuvah (repentance, or return), s'lichah (forgiveness), and kapparah (atonement). We've talked about the first and the last but not as much about the middle one. When we talk about forgiveness, we often focus on seeking it -- but we also have to be ready to grant it, when someone asks or even when the person doesn't ask. Sometimes the person who wronged you has no idea that he has done so, in which case he's not going to come to you. And sometimes the person knows he wronged you but he's not going to approach you and it's just not worth staying angry about it. So, I said, try to grant the possibility that the person might not know, and even if he doesn't, try not to carry minor grudges into the new year. It's just not worth it. Remember those words; they'll be relevant later.

One of the members of the group is a professor at a nearby college and is teaching a religion class this term. So, with advance notice to the rabbi, she brought about a dozen students to the service. The rabbi welcomed them and was extra-careful about giving page numbers, but otherwise did nothing special. Everything was going fine, and I assume the professor gave the students an overview of the service before she brought them.

( problem: the return of ranty-guy )

But other than that the day went really well, and I received many compliments on my last-minute torah reading. After the ranty guy left I spoke with a freshman from Pitt who was there for the first time, and she said she really enjoyed the service and will be back. We also told her about Yom Kippur services, and it sounds like she's planning to come. She seems like a nice person; I'm glad the ranty guy didn't scare her off.

After services we went to Coronation (SCA event), giving a ride to a student who's in the choir. It took a long time to get there due to heavy traffic caused by closed roads, but it was a good event and it was fun to spend the time in the car chatting with a newer member. We also sat with two newer members at dinner (I hadn't met them before, though one of them had heard of me), and they are both nice people I hope to see more of. A lot of people in the SCA worry about getting new members, which often comes through big demos and the like. But retention has a lot to do with that kind of one-on-one contact, and it's what I enjoy more. I'm not all that interested in pitching the SCA to a boy-scout troop, but I'm very interested in chatting with folks who've already decided to get involved about what they want to do and helping get them pointed in the right direction.

The dinner at the event was really good. I like it when Johan cooks. :-) In addition to being talented, he takes care to make sure that everyone will be able to get enough to eat -- at many events vegetarians basically get bread, noodles, rice, and maybe a salad, but I ate quite well yesterday -- spinach quiche, salmon (ok, "regular" vegetarians wouldn't eat that), noodles with cheese, asparagus, salad, nuts, another cooked vegetable, and more. I didn't even save room for dessert, as it turned out.

Friday night the sisterhood led Shabbat services. (They do this once a year. Brotherhood did theirs last month.) While they mostly did a good job with the individual parts, the whole was extremely disappointing. ( rant )

Friday's email brought a short reading list for the sh'liach k'hilah program. I am pleased that the list consists entirely of books I do not already own. This makes me even more optimistic about the program teaching me lots of things I don't already know. I expected that to be the case, but now I have some evidence to support that belief. (They haven't yet sent a detailed curriculum description.)

Saturday evening we went to an SCA dinner on the theme of "travelling food". There were more desserts than non-desserts, which in retrospect makes sense. Cookies are an obvious thing to make. I should have made something main-dish-y instead of individual strawberry tarts. It was a fun dinner, and I got to meet some new cats. :-) From there we went to an impromptu party that lefkowitzga threw together around some last-minute guests from out of town. She's a great party host, and I had fun talking with some people I don't see as often as I'd like.

Sunday dinner was especially tasty this week. ralphmelton grilled steaks that were very good; we concluded that the spice rub called "Chicago style" that he got at Penzey's was especially good. (I don't know what's in it. Eventually I will send agents to Penzey's to do some shopping for me, as the local instance has no hours that are compatable with working normal hours and keeping Shabbat.)

Random food note: sponge cake grilled for about 30 seconds per side and then topped with fruit is really good.

Saturday night we went to ralphmelton and lorimelton's for dinner and a viewing of the extended version of Fellowship of the Ring. Some of the cut scenes were appropriately cut; others were a real loss to the movie. I particularly liked the scene where the hobbits get a lesson about how filling lembas are (a sort of flatbread that only requires one bite a day for a full-sized elf).

The DVD has some extras, most of which we didn't watch. We did see a (long) trailer for the Two Towers. We also saw a rather, um, tasteless send-up of the Council of Elrond called "Lord of the Piercings". We had to google for the navigation instructions, as the person who suggested it couldn't remember the details.

I'll bet easter eggs were a lot more challenging a decade ago than they are now. :-)

Sunday night we went to an SCA potluck dinner. The theme this time was "birds, including things birds eat". We rejected chicken as too obvious, and decided not to do things with eggs (quiche, devilled eggs, etc) for a similar reason. We worried about duplication. I finally opted for baked salmon (some birds eat fish), which went over well. And, as it turned out, while the hostess made roasted chicken, there were no devilled eggs.

The creativity award has to go to the person who constructed a bird out of soft cheeses (with some structural elements), with wing and tail feathers carved out of peppers, sitting in a nest of (probably) shredded cabbage.

After recording Saturday's torah portion for posterity (or whatever suffices for same in non-digital media), I set to work on the portion I'm chanting Thursday. It came back more easily than I thought it would -- once I consented to flushing parts of the previous one from active memory. It's weird how that works. I can remember zillions of songs, even ones that are similar, but two similar torah portions are currently beyond me. I guess that will get better in time. I've got to find more opportunities to grow in this area. (For next year I will learn the final chunk of the weekday reading for this portion, but I'd like to do something before then, especially since I'm now starting to be able to parse the trope directly, without looking every symbol up in the book. I still have to look up the less-common ones, but that too will get better in time.)

At the Saturday service a random member of my congregation congratulated me on becoming chair of the worship committee. Ok, I assume that means they've told the outgoing chair by now...

This evening we went to an SCA household dinner. The theme was "old foods"; since I had failed to come up with any ideas around the "green and fuzzy" theme, we opted for what we hoped was entertainingly-faked documentation instead. We knew the host likes devilled eggs (as do I), so we told her we were bringing "devilled dodo eggs", and brought a facsimile of the recipe in the original hiroglyphics to prove it. Ok, maybe Mark Twain's "Diary of Adam and Eve" isn't really a primary source. :-)

I wanted to color the eggs in some way, just to give them an unusual appearance. I thought that I would get a purple hue by simmering them for a few hours in beet juice (with some white wine to help leech out color), but what I actually got was brown, not purple. Which was ok -- just unexpected. (I boiled the eggs, then rolled them around to crack the shells, and then simmered those. I completely peeled one egg to act as a color indicator, so I could check progress easily. On the other eggs I got a nice mottled effect.)

I have seen deep purple hard-boiled eggs. It's a striking effect with devilled eggs -- a nice contrast to the yellow filling. I wonder whether the process involved natural agents or chemicals.

We should take a turn for dinner sometime in the next several months, so I would like to grab a date around Purim and do "disguised foods". As part of this, I need to hit up my friend Yaakov for his "ham" recipe; I visited him for Purim last year and had this, and it was a remarkable imitation of real ham! I'm especially impressed because I'm pretty sure Yaakov has never tasted the real thing. (He called it "vam", so I infer that it's really veal. I don't actually know; Yaakov can say "here, taste this" to me and I'll do it without further questions.)