Back To The Usual Stuff

Having sorted out the car fiasco (Thanks Dad!) it's back to business.

Well what a week that ended up being, not just the car business but the sudden influx of visitors to the blog...I'm guessing it's thanks to Elise who visited us over the Bank Holiday weekend telling her friends about it, but I could be wrong.

A small number of images have been sent to Flikr from the last weekend, don't worry there are plenty more to come. These six are from the setting up before the cookery actually begins; you can see the 2 protective layers that we put down to protect the historic brick surface - the fluffy white stuff is furnace insulation and this is topped off with a mild steel plate. This combines to even the heat distribution over the whole surface of the bricks and cuts down on pesky hot spots which are bad for the historic bricks.
Other than that, you can see Robin applying some elbow grease to washing one of the table tops that is on continuous display, plenty of hot soapy water and Bob's your uncle...one clean table ready for cooking.
You'll also see one of the ceramic cook pots that has been temporarily retired from duty due to the cracks that it has developed. The aim is to carry on cooking with it until it breaks then compare the breaks to archaeological originals to see if there are any matches, hopefully this may shed light on how the Tudor originals met their end. This however needs a little bit of time and concentration applied to it, so will take place on one of the more experimental weekends later in the year.

What else????

2 videos sent to youtube; the first shows Barry trying out his 'new' mincing technique:



It uses two knives much like a Chinese chef would.....you can see the same technique being applied in the Luttrell Psalter and we've also come across it in later illustrations (which none of us can put our fingers on at the moment!!). It's quite noisy but also quite effective, with two knives built for the job then it could be a winner although not for ALL mincing jobs I'm sure.

The other video shows another test of the wax fountain:





It's coming together quite nicely as you can see, just a few more tweaks and alterations to get all the nozzles to flow evenly.

As I said earlier, more images to come along with some video of the new mountain being cast for the St George and the Dragon model that Dave and Adrian repaired.