Off To Market Jigedy Jig!

Off to the 'original reenactors market' tomorrow....have a look if there's anything new being made out there and pick up a few more contacts hopefully......to be honest it's a bit of a chore, but I am also going to look for stuff for the newly presented routes in the Palace as well, so that bit could be quite fun....the rest is usually a bit of a drag though, looking at quite a lot of cack with the odd nice thing sprinkled around, it is a good chance to catch up with people that you don't get to see very often though and it'll make a nice change to get out and about.

After that it'll be back on with the report and then start putting together plans for the Easter cookery....all of which I'll let you know as and when I sort the menus out (it'll be a full weekend of sit down meals though, that is for certain)

I've looked through all the pictures that I took over the weekend and this is the sum total that you haven't yet seen....

It's some of the pies after they were cooked. It's not much I know, but the rest of the pictures I took were specifically for the report and don't make interesting viewing....you know the sort of thing I'm sure, recording data collection etc. etc.
Perhaps when the report is in I'll pop some up, but who knows.

Off to bed now, you never know tomorrow may be an exciting day.....but I don't hold out too much hope.

Hmmmmm Pie!

A new video for you all to see!

Robin spent the past cookery weekend working on pie making with the 2 Barry's. They were trying out various ways of making the pies we produce more uniform, with the aim of removing the 'random' nature of the wall thickness that we've always ended up with.

If you check out the YouTube video that I posted some time ago where Robin raises a pie (the widget and link at the bottom of the right hand column will take you to the site), you'll see that he uses a method not dissimilar to making a thumb pot in clay....it works really well, but does require some practice to get consistent results and it takes longer than this new method. The beauty of the new method is that it's virtually idiot proof.....all the pies that the 3 of them made looked virtually identical.

The older technique results on the pie on the left, see the difference in the thickness of the case!

The video isn't of the best pies that the guys made, it seems that Robin is having to put a lot of effort into rolling the paste out (he swears he wasn't!!) but the paste had already been used a couple of times before so the gluten had really developed and resulted in some quite springy paste as you may have noticed towards the end of the video. He also shouldn't have cut the excess away, for every other one he just twisted the top off, but for this try he thought he'd try cutting the excess off which as you could see didn't work so well.

What else is new then?

Well I'm currently up to my neck in paperwork, writing my end of year report for the department....at the moment I'm sorting through all the roasting work we did and graphing all of the data that Robert has collected. With all this to do I've still not sorted through the results of last weekends cookery.....give me time eh!

What I can show you are some pictures of the newly paved Base Court...

This should now be open to the public and it'll be interesting to see how people react to the space which in the past was treated very much like a corridor. I know that already some people have commented on how sterile and sparse the area now looks, but I personally am a fan of the change....let's see how it develops as the year progresses.

I've Gone all Floppy!!

Well I've finally knuckled!........my cookery book, 'A Noble Boke of Cokery' is now available as a paperback from Lulu.

For the price of £10.78 you get the same contents as with the hardback edition, which is still available, but with a flexible cover and, for Britain at least, a much more sensible postage rate!

I hadn't realised how astronomically stupid the shipping rate had been changed to of late (that'll teach me to subscribe to newsletters in future!), for GB addresses it was half the cost of the book.....madness!!
The hardbacks are only printed in the US (I've been told that shipping to US addresses is not as criminally expensive, but I can't vouch for that I'm afraid) whereas paperbacks can be printed in the UK which substantially reduces the shipping costs, it's still more than I'd like (around £4.50), but I believe that this is where Lulu makes some of it's profit, so I can't begrudge them too much I suppose.

There's more information about the books on the information site along with a link to the Lulu shop.
Hope you enjoy.

TTFN