Now begins the Tourney ... uh ... Cooking Season

I started meal planning for Crown today and had to make a decision whether I'm going to go for the "random spontaneous dinner guest" plan again this year. (I.e., plan on enough food for 1 or 2 others for Saturday dinner and then challenge myself to find dinner guest(s) that aren't simply the same people I always hang out with.) In truth, I had something less than a 50% success rate last year -- although the "failure" is only psychological. It's not like the food goes to waste. You'd think it would be an easy enough thing to find people willing to be fed a semi-gourmet medieval dinner at the drop of a hat, but of course most people actually do have pre-existing food plans when they show up at events. And my ideal scenario of identifying, approaching, and successfully targeting people I don't already know well adds a lot of potential for failure. But then, if it were easy, it wouldn't be a comfort-zone challenge, now would it?

But then, when it comes down to it, this particular challenge falls into the "what the heck, why not" category. After all, I have to eat dinner at events. And I enjoy doing a fancy dinner even if it's just for me. And it isn't really any harder to prepare for 2-3 than it is for 1.

I don't know if I'll repeat last year's plan of focusing on exploring a particular cookbook for the season, but I'm starting off with a reminder that the Forme of Cury actually does have a good assortment of vegetable dishes in it, and an awful lot of them are very similar to how I cook by default these days anyway. So I think I'll start off with a menu that accompanies a chicken in sauce with dishes of parsnips, mushrooms, and fennel, plus a recipe for pork "tartlets" that looks suspiciously similar to won ton soup, and a tart of apples and pears for a fruit course. About 3/4 of the cooking can be done in advance, which helps a lot on the logistical side.