3.7.

I am very excited that Cudgel War is coming soon. I think about it a lot. These days I hate more headaches and pain (in my shoulder) because these things make me do things slower and I need and want to be fast now. Today I will sew more than yesterday. I hope that the dress is done by Monday. I have some decoration undone and I need to finish the hem. I am going to write some recipes down also today like yesterday and day before that and day before that and so on. I am glad that Ulf helped me today because we still have lots to do. Almost everything is in my head and in papers and books. I still haven’t decided some of the dishes. We want all the recipes fixed and enlarged by next Monday too. I have to send some emails and make some phone calls today also.

As always it is hard to find good dishes for the vegetarians for that long event (9 days). I don’t have anything against the vegetarians but when you want to be as accurate as possible it might be a problem to find good food without meat (or meat stock…). Well I might have limited point of view in this situation because I love meat. I can only try my best to make them happy also.

I am happy about that we don’t have so many recipes this time that we would need to try before making them at the event. Medieval recipes tend to be quite similar. That makes planning easy. I admit that we also tend to use same kind of recipes over and over again (ok, well last year we did lots of stuff we hadn’t done before that… and usually there is one or more things that we haven’t tried). But anyway the basics are the same all the time. One of the reasons is that if we know that people like something we want to make it or something like it again. And we of course cannot use expensive stuff when making food for lunches and snacks at the Cudgel. Well anyway the main thing is to get people full enough.

I think that some of the recipes, although they are very good, different, interesting etc. are too hard to make when you don’t have enough cooking space, people to help at the kitchen and the time. Having only few hours to prepare the foodstuff etc. are different things at our events comparing to Medieval times when the time/place/number of kitchen workers wasn’t the issue it they wanted to for example start preparing the “big” feast weeks advance.