Ordinarily.....

...I'd reply to comments with another comment, trying to keep it all neat and tidy, but Helen's question about comparisons of ingredients kid of got me thinking.

Unfortunately we didn't get around to doing any of the meat recipes that I'd planned to do for comparison purposes as the rest of the things took up all the time......well that and all the talking. This has got me thinking 'are we a bunch of slackers when left to our own devices?'

With this weekend and the June retrospective cookery, I had planned loads more recipes than we actually got round to doing and to be honest, that's always been the case when we do an event that doesn't have a tightly planned menu format. Now over the last couple of years, Robin, Marc H and myself have got it pretty sorted with the number of dishes that we can sensibly prepare in a working day.....it's usually about 7 dishes with one of them being a roast dish, so 6 made dishes plus all the interpreting/talking that goes with it in the gap from dinner to supper being served, along with the occasional work on a dish for the next day as well as preparing the dinner for first thing in the day.
With this in mind, I always plan for us to be able to do a similar number of dishes over each day when there is no formal menu structure to the cookery just like this last weekend.

SO.....how come we never manage to do that many dishes during these looser structured events? Do we talk more to the public? Are the recipes that we do cook more complex? (I'd hardly count boiling water as complicated......even Delia Smith takes that as a given!!) Or are we just a bunch of lack wit slackers?? Hmmm..........still not sure about that one.

Fortunately most of the recipes use ingredients that store easily....either in packets or in our freezer, probably the best tool that we have purchased for the project.

As for posting the dishes for the next weekend on 4th and 5th August......you'll know what we're doing just as soon as I know what we're doing!
Gimme a chance, there are other things to do in the mean time, like sort out Mondays 2 adult education cookery sessions. For your interest I'll post the course structure over the weekend for you all to peruse along with a few more pictures from last weekend.