Back To School....

First off, following up from the images posted last time, I've added 4 more of the new stuff on display in the kitchens.

Yesterday saw me visiting Hampton School near Hampton Court for school dinner!?
To clarify, this year is the 450th anniversary of their founders day and they wanted to have a Tudor meal as part of the celebration. they contacted Hampton Court around 6 months or so ago and I've been working with them on this project since then.

In reality all I did was to supply a few recipes, albeit ones that i thought would be suitable for them, i.e. not too complicated for what would be essentially a one off meal- when we cook we have the luxury of being able to stuff it up....big time...we can always try again next time, the school couldn't. I also had to take into account the numbers that they would be feeding.....over 1000 portions of each dish!!!!!

We had a few meetings to talk it all through, they put in a ton of work (much more than I had to anyway) and they also decided to make it much bigger than they'd originally planned. Bryan, the chap who suggested the event thought it would be great to make much more of a 'day' of it, so spread the work amongst the school departments. Not only did they all pull together for the day, they included all sort of Tudor themed work into their lessons, from the art department who had the kids paint Tudor portraits and 'tapestries' to decorate the hall, through the IT department who came to the Palace at Christmas where they videoed us cooking and projected it onto the walls of the hall to add ambiance. The music department had the kids learning Tudor music which was played throughout dinner and the English department had the upper 6th translating the original texts I sent them.

All in all I was most impressed. The school had 'gone for it' with gusto and were rewarded with a cracking meal to boot. Deborah, the lady in charge of the catering had done wonders and produced a cracking meal- Beef Stew, Pork Stew, Cabochis, Tarte owte of Lente, Pears in Syryp and Oyle soppes!! It tasted great and most surprising the kids seemed to enjoy it too- although I'll know more in the near future when we have a 'wash up' meeting.
As far as i can tell, this was probably the first time for a long time that anyone had tried a Tudor meal of the complexity that this was for such a large number of people.

Now that that's done, I can get back to the menu planning for Easter, all MUST be done and dusted by next Wednesday.....so if you'll excuse me, back to work!