I am still mistress of dayboards
Jul. 25th, 2007 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyjadwigaA quick look in the Roget's doesn't turn up any terms other than dominate or reign that really convey how I feel about the SRWC dayboard. It's mine. I'll "let" other people do it, if I have to. (I'm making fun of myself here. Other people should have a chance and autocrats have the right to pick people to work with.) And I will summarize/subsume any criticisms/objections I have to the way they do it as "That's not the way I would do it," because that would be the sum total of how I feel about it. (Ok, they should not run out of food. That's not right. But otherwise...)
So when I was offered a chance to do it this year, I jumped at it. Even though my housemate and dear friend was going to do the Sunday Breakfast. (We will never have this combination happen again. Two meals out of one house/family was too much stress.)
For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it's a cold buffet luncheon open to anyone who attends the event at no additional cost. The dayboard goes out about noon and stays open until we shift to 'court board'-- starting around 4:30-5:00-- which is held right outside where the Royal court (non-SCAdians think long awards ceremony) is held. Court board is usually done by the same person who does dayboard.* Generally, court is over around 8 or 8:30. We usually estimate about 700 people for the event, though they don't all eat dayboard. The budget has been holding firm at $800 for a number of years. The object of this game? Feed everyone you can get your paws on until they can't eat anymore, while minimizing waste. (Usually we take 3-4 boxes of leftovers home.) Dayboard is put out near the fighting field, and we try to send trays to MOL, Troll, Archery, etc. There's a separate set of trays for the royals, the royalty liason does them.
*Logistically and supplies-wise it makes sense to have the court board done by the same person. Personnel and stress wise it probably doesn't. But it's the way we do it, generally.
This is a big fighting event so I bend my rules a bit about what to serve.
The menu for this year:
- Raw 'baby' carrots (12 lbs), celery (12 bunches), and cucumbers (1/2 case)
- Stone fruit: peaches (1 and 2/3 case), plums (2/3 case), and nectarines (2/3 case)
- Strawberries (2 cases), blueberries (1.5 case), and cherries (1 case)
- Oranges (1.5 cases)
- Bananas (1.5 cases)-- not period for Europe. Potassium source.
- Daikon Radish salad (about 6 linear feet of daikon, sliced & cut into quarters, dressed with salt, wine vinegar, and olive oil)
- 8 round watermelons (about 12" diameter)
- 12 cantelopes
- 4 cases grapes
- 2 honeydews (small)
- 4 lbs of chickpeas cooked with onions and honey
- 50 pita breads (medium)
- 24 loaves of vienna bread
- 25-30 loaves of 'cheese boards' from Redner's market, extra-long loaves with cheese on top.
- 2 lbs butter
- 5 lbs of aquapatys (garlic boiled in water with olive oil)
- 1 lb honey butter (the leftovers of what we made for the queen)
- 1 quart pear mustard, 1 quart plain mustard (rumpolt), 1 quart spiced honey mustard made by my apprentice Izzy
- 3 quarts 'sauce for pigeons' -- a medieval salsa-type mixture of chopped onions, garlic, parsley, vinegar and water
- 2 cups Spicy green sauce with Garlic
- 5 cups of dried plum sauce (with nuts, spices, breadcrumbs and wine)
- dill pickles (6 gallons of wholes cut up into spears) and bread and butter pickles (4 3quart jars)
- 2 gallons of large black olives
- 5 bags of commercial thin pretzels
- 3 bone-in shank hams (cooked and cut into chunks)
- 6 packages of sliced hard salami
- 9 gallon bags (filled about 1/2 full) of leftover chicken
- 50 lbs of cheese
- 30 dozen hard boiled small eggs
- 8 quarts of lemon drink syrup
- 2 gallons of sekanjabin syrup
- 7 quarts of lemon-ginger drink syrup
- (for the courtboard) 2 lbs of 'food for angels'-- curd cheese (ricotta) mixed with sugar and orangeflower water
- (for the courtboard) 5 packages of pizelles-- vanilla because I couldn't get rosewater or lemon. :)
- (for the court board) 3 lbs jordan almonds
- candied ginger
If you want to see what I spent, the spreadsheet is at: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pGyH48GfGyxpgKnOi3asSKQ&hl=en_US
The attendance at the event was 630 including daytrippers but not including children under 7.
Temperature during the day was between 70 and 80 degrees.
I do the syrups in the weeks leading up to the event-- about 2 quarts of syrup will flavor a 5 gallon drink cooler. Candied ginger, pear butter for the mustard and dried plums, almonds and breadcrumbs came from other event leftovers. Pickles come from BJ discount club. I do my first produce run on Wednesday to the places in Allentown (ham, celery, carrots, parsley, olives, onions, garlic, pitas, dried chickpeas). On Thursday I hit Lancaster, where I got the cheese, the salami-- a wild sale-- pretzels, eggs, ricotta, cherries, plums, melons and some blueberries, bananas, honey, mustard seed.
We have the use of a large standing refrigerator/display cooler at the site, plus they let us put stuff in their beer cooler, so the refrigerated stuff all got dropped off Wednesday, and Thursday. (No place to keep it at home!)
Friday morning I put the chickpeas to soak and Gino and I made a produce run to a place in Cressona that gives us very good deals. We got the grapes, the peaches, the honeydews, some celery, oranges, strawberries and more blueberries.
Master Evan helped with everything, including hard-boiling all 30 dozen eggs. Pickles and radishes got sliced in the morning/afternoon. Derek picked up the cheese boards for me on his town run. Juergen picked up the 24 loaves of bread for me at Food4Less on his way to the event.
I cut up the pitas into wedges. Appalonia, Nathan, ? the guy from Tandy leather and his girlfriend, and Sophia von Eisental sliced cheese. The Evan and the guy from tandy did the celery. Evan and I started the garlic, which we split into cloves and cut the ends off the cloves. Evan, Bruni and I did the actual garlic peeling, which I helped by par boiling the garlic for a few minutes. Bruni worked like crazy in the kitchen, too. Juliana, Sarah, Aegidius, Izzy, Annys, Evan, Aellin, and Bruni all helped in the kitchen. The food for angels was made. Evan made the dried plum sauce which looked unnervingly like double-chocolate cake batter. Izzy made all the mustards. Annys made the honey butter. Onions were diced and sauteed and added to the chickpeas in a roaster with water and honey to cook overnight (less water next time and a higher temp, I think.) We picked the parsley off its stems and made the spicy green sauce and the sauce for pigeons. We also made a second of the 2 gallons of sekanjabin from herbs I picked in my mom's garden on thursday.
Saturday morning we had more help-- Brenna?, Anne of Hatfield, Aellin, and others ?? who were they?!-- also stopped by to help in addition to everyone else. My mom came and worked like a stevedore! Mirin Izzy'sson and Kobe Annys'son washed all the fruit (except some of the oranges, which we ended up having to wash later because there were a few bad ones in the case). 4 cantelopes and 4 watermelons were cut up. As things were prepped, we put them in my SUV and took them up to the field. Tanzos Illona put together the royalty trays. Random people-- mostly teens-- were subborned to bring stuff up to the field or out of the 'beer cooler of Moiria' as we call it. We divvied up the chicken by type (part of it had been flavored with fruit and Crystal Light), checked to see it was defrosted-- it was leftovers from the last event, kept frozen) and heated it in the oven in a little chicken broth.
We kept back 5 lbs of strawberries and 5 pints of blueberries, as well as the honeydews, for the court board.
We had 3 very long tables under a garage tent. We had 8-10 pitchers and 2 5-gallon coolers. I had 'em put water in the pitchers and lemon drink in one cooler, sekanjabin in the other. The water station was quite nearby.
The dayboard was out by 12:15. Admittedly, it was pretty 'shiny', seeing as most of the stuff was put out in aluminum baking trays (cheap and disposable) but there was a lot of food. We kept cutting fruit (the bananas are cut in half because we find people are happier with a half-banana) as needed, cutting bread as needed, and topping up the containers. Only a little meat and a little more cheese goes out at a time, and I held back the salami until 3 pm when fighting started slowing down because I'm sick of hearing 'there's no protein [read meat] for me when I'm finished fighting!' Ysabeau, the autocrat, did the 2nd run of chicken for us when the first run ran out.
The ham lasted until 2 pm and we ended up with leftover cheese! However, they ate *all* the carrots. They never eat all the carrots! We were down to 2 flats (5 dozen) hard boiled eggs long before 5:00 when we were to shift to court board.
We tidied up for the court board and refilled, putting everything out that we could, including the honeydews, jordan almonds, pizelles, food for angels, etc. By the middle of the court board we had no cheese bread left. We used up all but 3 loaves of bread. The mustards and plum sauce didn't go so well, but everyone liked the food for angels who tasted it. We added some melba toast when the pizelles ran out. We got water coolers of water and gatorade from water point, and started serving ginger drink in the pitchers
Leftovers: 1 watermelon. 1 jar of dill pickles? (that was strange) 1/2 jar of olives, 1/2 jar bread and butter pickles, 1 bag of pretzels which we gave to the bar, 1/4 tray of mixed grapes, 1/8 tray of mixed berries & cherries, 1 case of peaches & mixed stone fruit. 1/2 case bananas. 1/2 case oranges, 1-2 lbs of cheese. Some food for angels. 1 gallon sekanjabin, 2-3 quarts lemon syrup, 1.5 gallons ginger syrup. 4 large cans worth of gatorade mix, 2 small cans worth of gatorade mix. 2 full gallon bags of celery.
The pear mustard and the dried plum sauce didn't have many takers, but those who tried them said they liked them.. They cleaned out the aquapatys and sauce for pigeons and did yeoman work on the rest of the sauces. It was like locusts.
My big failure? The trays didn't go out. Sonja came over and got food for the Registration/Troll table twice, Astrid took food to MOL, someone took food to archery & thrown weapons, and someone else came and got pitchers and a tray for the Athena's Thimble panelling judges, bless them. I'm really glad people stepped in to do it, because I just lost track.
I'm so grateful to everyone who helped. If I didn't mention you here, please say something, I want to have everyone listed so I can remember all your help! It was great. The Royal entourage scared me by coming up to get a plate for the queen after I knew I'd seen the food go to the royal tent, but they said she just wanted snacks for walking around so I calmed down. (Royals also got garlic ring baloney, a regional specialty, dried fruit and nuts, and some ranch dressing for their veg, at their request.)
Everyone loved the food. Everyone ate and ate and ate. We even fed a few late-comers when we went up to clear off the court board after a quick dip in the pool-- it was their first outdoor event and they hadn't known there was food or where to find it!) Oh. And yes, I came in under budget. :) I got many compliments from out-of-shire.
(It was only the stress of getting the kitchen ready for breakfast and helping with breakfast prep that burnt me out at the end...) It was a happy dayboard and I am pleased with myself.
So when I was offered a chance to do it this year, I jumped at it. Even though my housemate and dear friend was going to do the Sunday Breakfast. (We will never have this combination happen again. Two meals out of one house/family was too much stress.)
For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, it's a cold buffet luncheon open to anyone who attends the event at no additional cost. The dayboard goes out about noon and stays open until we shift to 'court board'-- starting around 4:30-5:00-- which is held right outside where the Royal court (non-SCAdians think long awards ceremony) is held. Court board is usually done by the same person who does dayboard.* Generally, court is over around 8 or 8:30. We usually estimate about 700 people for the event, though they don't all eat dayboard. The budget has been holding firm at $800 for a number of years. The object of this game? Feed everyone you can get your paws on until they can't eat anymore, while minimizing waste. (Usually we take 3-4 boxes of leftovers home.) Dayboard is put out near the fighting field, and we try to send trays to MOL, Troll, Archery, etc. There's a separate set of trays for the royals, the royalty liason does them.
*Logistically and supplies-wise it makes sense to have the court board done by the same person. Personnel and stress wise it probably doesn't. But it's the way we do it, generally.
This is a big fighting event so I bend my rules a bit about what to serve.
The menu for this year:
- Raw 'baby' carrots (12 lbs), celery (12 bunches), and cucumbers (1/2 case)
- Stone fruit: peaches (1 and 2/3 case), plums (2/3 case), and nectarines (2/3 case)
- Strawberries (2 cases), blueberries (1.5 case), and cherries (1 case)
- Oranges (1.5 cases)
- Bananas (1.5 cases)-- not period for Europe. Potassium source.
- Daikon Radish salad (about 6 linear feet of daikon, sliced & cut into quarters, dressed with salt, wine vinegar, and olive oil)
- 8 round watermelons (about 12" diameter)
- 12 cantelopes
- 4 cases grapes
- 2 honeydews (small)
- 4 lbs of chickpeas cooked with onions and honey
- 50 pita breads (medium)
- 24 loaves of vienna bread
- 25-30 loaves of 'cheese boards' from Redner's market, extra-long loaves with cheese on top.
- 2 lbs butter
- 5 lbs of aquapatys (garlic boiled in water with olive oil)
- 1 lb honey butter (the leftovers of what we made for the queen)
- 1 quart pear mustard, 1 quart plain mustard (rumpolt), 1 quart spiced honey mustard made by my apprentice Izzy
- 3 quarts 'sauce for pigeons' -- a medieval salsa-type mixture of chopped onions, garlic, parsley, vinegar and water
- 2 cups Spicy green sauce with Garlic
- 5 cups of dried plum sauce (with nuts, spices, breadcrumbs and wine)
- dill pickles (6 gallons of wholes cut up into spears) and bread and butter pickles (4 3quart jars)
- 2 gallons of large black olives
- 5 bags of commercial thin pretzels
- 3 bone-in shank hams (cooked and cut into chunks)
- 6 packages of sliced hard salami
- 9 gallon bags (filled about 1/2 full) of leftover chicken
- 50 lbs of cheese
- 30 dozen hard boiled small eggs
- 8 quarts of lemon drink syrup
- 2 gallons of sekanjabin syrup
- 7 quarts of lemon-ginger drink syrup
- (for the courtboard) 2 lbs of 'food for angels'-- curd cheese (ricotta) mixed with sugar and orangeflower water
- (for the courtboard) 5 packages of pizelles-- vanilla because I couldn't get rosewater or lemon. :)
- (for the court board) 3 lbs jordan almonds
- candied ginger
If you want to see what I spent, the spreadsheet is at: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pGyH48GfGyxpgKnOi3asSKQ&hl=en_US
The attendance at the event was 630 including daytrippers but not including children under 7.
Temperature during the day was between 70 and 80 degrees.
I do the syrups in the weeks leading up to the event-- about 2 quarts of syrup will flavor a 5 gallon drink cooler. Candied ginger, pear butter for the mustard and dried plums, almonds and breadcrumbs came from other event leftovers. Pickles come from BJ discount club. I do my first produce run on Wednesday to the places in Allentown (ham, celery, carrots, parsley, olives, onions, garlic, pitas, dried chickpeas). On Thursday I hit Lancaster, where I got the cheese, the salami-- a wild sale-- pretzels, eggs, ricotta, cherries, plums, melons and some blueberries, bananas, honey, mustard seed.
We have the use of a large standing refrigerator/display cooler at the site, plus they let us put stuff in their beer cooler, so the refrigerated stuff all got dropped off Wednesday, and Thursday. (No place to keep it at home!)
Friday morning I put the chickpeas to soak and Gino and I made a produce run to a place in Cressona that gives us very good deals. We got the grapes, the peaches, the honeydews, some celery, oranges, strawberries and more blueberries.
Master Evan helped with everything, including hard-boiling all 30 dozen eggs. Pickles and radishes got sliced in the morning/afternoon. Derek picked up the cheese boards for me on his town run. Juergen picked up the 24 loaves of bread for me at Food4Less on his way to the event.
I cut up the pitas into wedges. Appalonia, Nathan, ? the guy from Tandy leather and his girlfriend, and Sophia von Eisental sliced cheese. The Evan and the guy from tandy did the celery. Evan and I started the garlic, which we split into cloves and cut the ends off the cloves. Evan, Bruni and I did the actual garlic peeling, which I helped by par boiling the garlic for a few minutes. Bruni worked like crazy in the kitchen, too. Juliana, Sarah, Aegidius, Izzy, Annys, Evan, Aellin, and Bruni all helped in the kitchen. The food for angels was made. Evan made the dried plum sauce which looked unnervingly like double-chocolate cake batter. Izzy made all the mustards. Annys made the honey butter. Onions were diced and sauteed and added to the chickpeas in a roaster with water and honey to cook overnight (less water next time and a higher temp, I think.) We picked the parsley off its stems and made the spicy green sauce and the sauce for pigeons. We also made a second of the 2 gallons of sekanjabin from herbs I picked in my mom's garden on thursday.
Saturday morning we had more help-- Brenna?, Anne of Hatfield, Aellin, and others ?? who were they?!-- also stopped by to help in addition to everyone else. My mom came and worked like a stevedore! Mirin Izzy'sson and Kobe Annys'son washed all the fruit (except some of the oranges, which we ended up having to wash later because there were a few bad ones in the case). 4 cantelopes and 4 watermelons were cut up. As things were prepped, we put them in my SUV and took them up to the field. Tanzos Illona put together the royalty trays. Random people-- mostly teens-- were subborned to bring stuff up to the field or out of the 'beer cooler of Moiria' as we call it. We divvied up the chicken by type (part of it had been flavored with fruit and Crystal Light), checked to see it was defrosted-- it was leftovers from the last event, kept frozen) and heated it in the oven in a little chicken broth.
We kept back 5 lbs of strawberries and 5 pints of blueberries, as well as the honeydews, for the court board.
We had 3 very long tables under a garage tent. We had 8-10 pitchers and 2 5-gallon coolers. I had 'em put water in the pitchers and lemon drink in one cooler, sekanjabin in the other. The water station was quite nearby.
The dayboard was out by 12:15. Admittedly, it was pretty 'shiny', seeing as most of the stuff was put out in aluminum baking trays (cheap and disposable) but there was a lot of food. We kept cutting fruit (the bananas are cut in half because we find people are happier with a half-banana) as needed, cutting bread as needed, and topping up the containers. Only a little meat and a little more cheese goes out at a time, and I held back the salami until 3 pm when fighting started slowing down because I'm sick of hearing 'there's no protein [read meat] for me when I'm finished fighting!' Ysabeau, the autocrat, did the 2nd run of chicken for us when the first run ran out.
The ham lasted until 2 pm and we ended up with leftover cheese! However, they ate *all* the carrots. They never eat all the carrots! We were down to 2 flats (5 dozen) hard boiled eggs long before 5:00 when we were to shift to court board.
We tidied up for the court board and refilled, putting everything out that we could, including the honeydews, jordan almonds, pizelles, food for angels, etc. By the middle of the court board we had no cheese bread left. We used up all but 3 loaves of bread. The mustards and plum sauce didn't go so well, but everyone liked the food for angels who tasted it. We added some melba toast when the pizelles ran out. We got water coolers of water and gatorade from water point, and started serving ginger drink in the pitchers
Leftovers: 1 watermelon. 1 jar of dill pickles? (that was strange) 1/2 jar of olives, 1/2 jar bread and butter pickles, 1 bag of pretzels which we gave to the bar, 1/4 tray of mixed grapes, 1/8 tray of mixed berries & cherries, 1 case of peaches & mixed stone fruit. 1/2 case bananas. 1/2 case oranges, 1-2 lbs of cheese. Some food for angels. 1 gallon sekanjabin, 2-3 quarts lemon syrup, 1.5 gallons ginger syrup. 4 large cans worth of gatorade mix, 2 small cans worth of gatorade mix. 2 full gallon bags of celery.
The pear mustard and the dried plum sauce didn't have many takers, but those who tried them said they liked them.. They cleaned out the aquapatys and sauce for pigeons and did yeoman work on the rest of the sauces. It was like locusts.
My big failure? The trays didn't go out. Sonja came over and got food for the Registration/Troll table twice, Astrid took food to MOL, someone took food to archery & thrown weapons, and someone else came and got pitchers and a tray for the Athena's Thimble panelling judges, bless them. I'm really glad people stepped in to do it, because I just lost track.
I'm so grateful to everyone who helped. If I didn't mention you here, please say something, I want to have everyone listed so I can remember all your help! It was great. The Royal entourage scared me by coming up to get a plate for the queen after I knew I'd seen the food go to the royal tent, but they said she just wanted snacks for walking around so I calmed down. (Royals also got garlic ring baloney, a regional specialty, dried fruit and nuts, and some ranch dressing for their veg, at their request.)
Everyone loved the food. Everyone ate and ate and ate. We even fed a few late-comers when we went up to clear off the court board after a quick dip in the pool-- it was their first outdoor event and they hadn't known there was food or where to find it!) Oh. And yes, I came in under budget. :) I got many compliments from out-of-shire.
(It was only the stress of getting the kitchen ready for breakfast and helping with breakfast prep that burnt me out at the end...) It was a happy dayboard and I am pleased with myself.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-25 04:56 pm (UTC)*hugs*
Sorry I missed it :-(
Date: 2007-07-25 05:10 pm (UTC)And I know what you mean. Balfar's Challenge...
:-D
no subject
Date: 2007-07-25 10:16 pm (UTC)SHE is in BIG trouble. Big trouble, I tell you....
Wish I had been there!