What's Cooking This Weekend?

Good question......and one that I had said that I'd answer sometime this week.

The plan is that on Saturday we shall try to cook:
roast beef
beef y-stwyd
buttyrd wortys
coleys
wardons in syryp
ryse of genoa
and chawettys

with Sunday seeing us try:
roast beef
buknade
crustade lumbarde
sauge
and perre

Both days will hopefully also see Pick and Carter continuing with their bread experiments as well as trying to make rastons.

Nothing really adventurous or out of the ordinary as it happens, but there is method in my madness. To see some of the recipes you can search back through the blog where I've posted some of them before (or perhaps purchase the recipe book eh!) and I'll post a few more either later this week or early next week.

Why cook such a 'mundane' set of meals with recipes that we've tried fairly successfully several times in the past? The aim this weekend is to work on food that will in the future form the menu for a fundraising dinner at Hampton Court Palace, so hopefully this weekend will see us sort out the menus foundations as well as seeing the start of work into portion size and probably most importantly, working on the size of the 'lumps' in each dish.

The idea for the fundraiser is that guests will be able to get an idea of the dining style of the Tudor period whilst still having all of the comfort of a modern meal......Robert put it best I think when he said that the idea was to prepare a meal as if the food service style hadn't evolved or changed, only the service ware! So instead of serving food in bowls that the diners help themselves from, they will be presented with a selection of person sized portions to choose from......don't worry, it'll become much clearer in the future when we can take pictures to show you! As the portions will be smaller than we'd normally make, we think that the size of the bits of meat and so on will need to be smaller and that's what we'll be playing with this weekend.

One offshoot from all of this is that we should end up with a group of redacted recipes that will allow the less adventurous cook to try them at home.......yes, yes I know, I'm on record as saying how much I dislike modern redaction's of history recipes.....but in this case as we'll be catering for 200 people we really will need some constants to work to so that quality is maintained throughout.

That's about all I can say about the meal for now, still loads of details to get sorted.....like when and how and who, but I'm sure that these will all get sorted in good time and when the time comes I'll be able to tell you more about it.

I've put a few of Roberts pictures from last months cookery up on Flickr, not as many as I thought there would be to be honest....I'll just put that down to him learning how to use his new camera and us not actually doing as many photogenic dishes as we have in the past.