hrj | Entries tagged with reviews: events

Between schedules and priorities and whatnot, this is the first of the several annual West Coast Culinary Symposia that I've attended. An entire weekend of historic food geeking. (Mostly SCA, but there was a strong outreach to local non-SCA interested parties this year and we got a good handful of people from other historic groups and simply interested non-hobbyists.) Back when things were getting organized I kept dithering about what I wanted to teach until almost too late, but then the open-fire cooking teacher had to cancel and since I'd wanted to do something along that line I got a 3-hour slot to teach beginning heat management and working with reproduction cookware. (I'd play-tested the idea at Erinwood Arts last year, which was good because it helped with time management.)

So I took Friday off work because I knew I wanted to do all the ingredient prep for my class in advance, and simply because I wanted it to be as relaxing an event as possible rather than having to be all packed by Thursday night and then dashing off after work Friday. So I was able to sleep in, pack in a leisurely fashion, stop by the Compass Star for lunch on the way out, and get to the site an hour before official opening time. The event was at the Bothin Youth Center (a Girl Scout camp) in Marin which had the advantage of multiple buildings each with its own kitchen facilities and the ... um ... feature of dormitory style housing with bunk beds. (Note that I'm not complaining about the housing -- it was cheap and reasonably comfortable and very sociable.) There was a lot of late partying in the various dorm common rooms, although I think I got to be by 11 both nights, on general principles. (Also because the socializing in the common rooms involved an extremely high decibel level and I hit my tolerance level fairly quickly.)

Besides which, I had an open-fire cooking class to teach first thing on Saturday, which meant that when other people were wandering down to the main dining hall for breakfast, I was already in the middle of setting up for class at the outdoor cooking area and getting coals started and all. I had 10 students (working in pairs) and a variable number of auditors. The cooking area was a sunken pit about 12 ft diameter, with a raised grill feature (which we didn't use) sticking out from one side. So we had 5 cooking stations set up around the edge of the protruding grill, plus I had my portable fire box set up for a 6th fire. The idea was to get the students in practice working up a good set of coals (I'd started a small heap for each station in advance) then they would rotate between equipment for 5 types of cooking: simple boiling (meatballs in broth, plus a thickened sauce), gentle heating (custard), pan-frying (payn perdu), deep-frying (crisps, i.e., medieval funnel-cakes), and wafers. Plus I had a couple pans of Smale Brydes y-Stewed going in the separate fire-box which was sort of an extra-credit item (although it ended up being more for me to amuse myself with so I didn't over-manage the students).

My optimistic plan was for all students to get to do all 5 stations, but it took longer than expected to get the coals all built up and I think people only got to 2-3 stations by the end of the 3 hour period. (This meant I had a bunch of leftover prepared ingredients, about which more later.) Nobody complained (to me) about not getting to do all the techniques and I got a lot of positive feedback on the underlying concept of the class. A number of the students were really fired up about getting their own equipment and doing more reproduction-cookware cooking in the future. (I even got a kickback from Mercy the Potter for creating new clients for her pottery!) Now I need to format up the class handout for the symposium proceedings (and add things like where to get equipment and supplies, and maybe some more discussion on "lessons learned").

After lunch and the featured speaker I took a class-period off to go back and clean up after my class (i.e., the equivalent of packing down after a day-event) then got to relax for the rest of the event. I spent the rest of Saturday afternoon following The One True Whey in the cheese track ("Cooking with Cheese" and a cheese tasting of medievally plausible cheeses, both by

the_cheese_lady. One feature of the event was that dishes cooked during the classes became part of the food plan, so the results of my class were served as part of lunch, and dinner included all manner of class projects, including a gilded cockatrice that breathed flame. There was a presentation of research papers after dinner in the main hall, then off to (brief) partying and bed. Sunday breakfast was leftovers -- a term that does no justice to the wonder that the morning-after detritis of a culinary symposium can be. (A roast pork leg from the class on breaking a pig carcass, leftover saffron custard pies, the pilaws from

layla_lilah's class that hadn't quite finished in time for dinner, fresh skyr, and more and more.)

Sunday morning I took part in the panel presentation on the history, development, and scope of the Perfectly Period Feast Movement ... which garnered some very enthusiastic new adherents this weekend. Then it was a matter of packing, helping a little with clean-up, and home again. After emptying the car, before I could lose momentum, I cooked up the unused ingredients from my class, so the fridge now contains a serving of Pompes (meatballs with almond milk sauce), Smale Bryddes, and a massive stack of cheesy wafers (more on which below). Much as I hate waste, I just dumped the leftover batter for the Crisps because I didn't want to deal with deep-frying (and the crisps are best when fresh and that much fried food is Not On My Eating Plan). The leftover eggs from the custard and payn perdu stations got hardboiled and I'll probably turn them into deviled eggs to take to Wednesday practice or something.

Having now done some intensive parallel wafer-making with my two wafer irons, I find I much prefer the incised iron one (that I picked up from someone at the Villa Luna rummage sale last summer) over the aluminum pizzelle-style iron I picked up a number of years ago. The pizzelle iron makes a deeper, more waffle-like item, but is more prone to getting bits of batter stuck in the grooves and the results for my standard batter tend to be more crepe-like in behavior. Whereas the incised iron one (i.e., the design is simple lines in a flat face) had almost no sticking at all and produced a relatively crisp product (using about half the batter per wafer that the pizzelle uses). It also seemed to require less frequent oiling. I've been thinking it would be fun to make wafers over the campfire at events to fill the ecological niche of marshmallow-toasting, and the new wafer iron would work much better for this since using seems to be a much lower maintenance process.

I think my next on-site cooking goal will be to get the spit set up for my fire-box (including some sort of automatic turning mechanism, although I'm still exploring options on that end). I should be able to get something worked up by West-An Tir War. Plenty of time!

As the first SF MacWorld Expo where Apple wasn't an exhibitor, there's been a lot of buzz about what the effects would be, and whether they'd be distinguishable from the effects of the general economy. (And also a certain amount of buzz noting that, given the timing of Apple's iPad announcment, it seems a bit stupid for Apple not to have participated in the Expo and announced it there.) I have to say, from where I stand, that there's a real possibility -- but far from a certainty -- that the absence of Apple has triggered a death spiral for the event. I've only been attending for the last half dozen years or so (I think -- I'd have to do some research to figure it out precisely) and I've seen the size of the Expo flow and ebb. There was at least one previous year when it only filled half of the Moscone Center space, as it did this year, and it was back to both sides the year after that.

But when

scotica and her friend Rob and I were mulling it over on the drive back to her place (for Olympics viewing) after attending the Expo yesterday, we kept coming up with more and more examples of long-term favorite exhibitors who were absent this year. All in all, it felt very thin on the ground. (Another metric is the sad scarcity of freebies -- although I think some of that perception is fueled by the shift from stacks of software demo CDs to pointing people at downloadable demos, which is hard to fault on an environmental basis. But the useless tchatchkas -- pens, keychains, foam toys, etc. -- were also very thin on the ground.)

I went into the Expo with a small handful of "missions" as well as the usual intent to check out new stuff, and I failed at all of them, either due to the relevant exhibitor not being present, or due to exhibitors having skipped bringing the stuff I was interested in. I did come away with several nice new toys: a solar charger for the iPhone (handy for future camping trips -- you can leave it on the dashboard charging during the day, then fully recharge your phone when you come back in the evening), a sport armband iPhone purse-case from ArmPocket, which should be handy for bicycling, one of those Gorillapod wrap-around tripod thingies for my digital camera, and for one of this year's emergent themes a pair of Telefingers touch-sensitive iPhone gloves, which enable you to use your touch-screen without freezing your fingers off.

There were several emergent themes from the Expo:

The aforementioned touch-sensitive iPhone gloves. (Three or four different vendors. There was one vendor who had some very nice leather ones, but I'd already bought a cheaper pair elsewhere and while I've been thinking about getting a nice pair of leather driving gloves, I don't know that I'd want to combine the functions.)

Portable iPhone/iPod rechargers (also portable laptop external batteries). These have been available pretty much since the emergence of the power-guzzling iPhone, but there seemed to be an explosion of new products this year. Maybe I just don't use my iPhone enough, but aside from camping trips to locations without electrical outlets (which, coincidentally, typically don't have enough signal to use the iPhone much), I've been quite satisfied with the one model of emergency backup power that I have. So I wasn't in the market.

Page-feeding and ultralight sheet-feed scanners. The sort that ScanSnap has been featuring for years, but I think there were four companies with very similar product ranges this year. My crew chatted up all of them about putting out an ultra-light rolling (rather than sheet-feeding) scanner -- something equivalent to the PlanOn Scanner for which I'd like to see competition -- but nobody seemed to have anything similar in the works.

It was also amusing to see how many of the accessory manufacturers already had finished prototypes of gear for the iPad. Targus had some truly drool-worthy cases and sleeves. Some company I won't name or link to because their salesman annoyed me had a keyboard-dock (prop the iPad up in it as a semi-vertical screen and type on a full external keyboard). And, of course, the promise of iPads was the biggest common feature of vendor raffles. (I will probably be buying an iPad after about a year, when they've had a chance to work the bugs out. I note, however, that one of the potential uses for it that I was kicking around at the Crosston Ball -- i.e., a sheet music reader -- is quite likely to be developed (heads-up courtesy of

ohiblather ). So I have high hopes that by the time I'm willing to take a chance of a new Apple device, I will have discovered enough practical uses for it that my conscience will be clear in buying one.

On the whole "Death spiral or temporary slowdown?" issue, I have to say that there wasn't enough meat to this year's MacWorld Expo to draw me back for a second day, even with the convenience of it being open on a Saturday (today) and even with the draw of an iPad demo today. I will definitely still plan on attending as usual next year, but if next year is as thin or thinner than this year, I'll re-evaluate. This would be unfortunate for the Apple byproducts market, because attending the Expo has driven a enormous percentage of my software and peripheral buying. And, frankly, for me the Apple corporate presence was never a big part of the draw. Yeah, it was nice to see the new products in the flesh, as it were, before buying. But that's not what I spend my money on at the Expo itself.

Wow! Nice ride! ( Of course, there are more details than that. )

My 4th of July BBQ & games was a fun little party (and, as usual in my social circles, ended up with twice as much food as half the number of people could eat). We ended up with 8 people (although one retreated to his sick-bed with a cold), ran through Settlers of Cataan, a roll-the-alphabet-dice-and-form-words game whose name escapes me, and a couple rounds of Trans America, interspersed with grilling, ice cream, and a walk out to the Emeryville Marina to see fireworks.

Grill review: I need to work on pacing for my grilling (particularly if it's to be a primary social activity rather than a get-the-food-on-the-table activity). The corn took longer than I expected, and the grilled veggies needed to be being plated as they came off rather than being stacked in the warmer. The meat (of many varieties -- everybody brought enough to share) generally worked out well. I'm starting to get the hang of the temperature variation on various parts of the grill surface, and how to alternate open-hood and closed-hood temperature manipulation. Since I have a stack of ungrilled leftover ingredients, I figure I'll do some more practicing this weekend.

Fireworks review: The fog was fickle. We walked out along the south side of Powell St and could see both the Jack London Square show (except for the lowest stuff which was hidden by intervening buildings and port equipment) and an assortment of probably unauthorized items from the West Oakland trajectory. As we got out past the fire station (where a couple of enterprising fire crew were hawking refreshments in support of the Special Olympics) we could see occasional cloud-glows from the San Francisco show, but it was clear that there wasn't any point in trying to position ourselves for a better western view. So we crossed over to the boat harbor by Trader Vics, then wandered slightly south to avoid the actual harbor view to take in the Berkeley show. Alas, there was a fairly solid fog river flowing in right over the Berkeley Marina, so we saw the lower half of about the first half of the show, and then the fog thickened and all we were getting was cloud-glow. We actually got a much better view of something roughly up Richmond way. I don't know if it was in Richmond proper (I wondered if they might be doing a show at the racetrack in Albany, but it could have been all the way out to the Hercules/Pinole area. And, of course, there were a lot of random (if less ambitious) unauthorized items sprinkled across the horizon. So it was a good evening for getting a sense of the scope of Bay Area firesworks in all their forms, but not as good for seeing a single show in all its glory. I keep thinking that some year I should bike off to the Berkeley Marina proper to see that one up close. (You do not attempt to drive around the waterfront to try to view the shows. In fact they usually barricade most of the relevant streets just to forestall the issue.)

I decided to take in a single day at Baycon, since I have a bunch of catching up around the house to do this weekend. One of my planned hanging-out buddies cancelled, so it was just me and

scotica with occasional intersections with the downstairs tenant who had gotten a ride with me. I managed a small amount of bumping into folks and chatting. The programming was a bit disappointing though. It seemed like there were more program slots where there wasn't anything much of interest than there were where I had to make decisions between items. A few too many "generic con panel on standard topic X" and moderators who contributed to off-topicness rather than guiding things back on-topic. But at least the day ended up with a couple of unintentionally-amusing panels. (In the same way that historic-theme movies can be unintentionally amusing.) The panel on historic female pirates (the Baycon theme for this year was pirates) inspired

scotica and I to review our "historic movie/fiction fallacies" checklist. We got as high as 21 checkbox items, although we invented some new pirate-specific ones. ( A sampling of checkbox items. )

I confess I allowed myself to be egged on to a leading question with side bets on the panel's answer. After the panelists had listed off a handful of anecdotes about "actual historic Viking women pirates" I asked about what sources I might use for further research into this topic if I wanted to dig deeper. You'd think that after we'd been told about some highly specific examples, the proposed reading list would be a bit less vague than "sagas and runestones". (I'm afraid it was about the level of specificity that the bet had predicted.) I'm all for people researching and educating about non-traditional women in history. Unfortunately you don't research and educate by rattling off a string of vague unsupported and unsourced claims.

We were hoping to bump into

klwilliams at some point, but concluded she must have been hanging out in room parties somewhere with all her famous author friends. (pout)

Yesterday I made my annual Mac-geek pilgrimage to the MacWorld Expo in SF, in company with the usual suspects (esp.

scotica). While I'm not immediately in the market for any of the hot new products, I did spend some time fondling the new Macbook Air and proclaim it eminently fondlable. The only major purchase I ended up getting was the upgrade to the Leopard operating system, although I fell slightly in lust with a project/contacts organization system that actually looks like my brain feels. (The name is, in fact, something like "Your Brain".) I lusted after several assorted pieces of luggage, all of which more or less duplicate functions that I already have luggage for, so they were safe to lust after.

And while in the middle of checking out one of the various POD (that's Print On Demand for the non-writerly readers)) companies, I suddenly had the belated flash of insight that the solution to getting Harpy Publications back up and running is to switch to a POD model with a company that handles all the order fulfillment. Since I'm primarily dealing with people who know the publications exist and simply want to obtain them, rather than a situation where I'm trying to go out and promote them to an unknowing public, this is pretty much an ideal solution. It does mean that I'd need to transform my literal paste-ups into pdf format, but that's a lot less effort than doing order fulfillment out of my living room. Of course, the POD solution doesn't cover the various songbooks -- specifically Dreamer and Songbook Pusher -- that wouldn't get reprinted even if I managed to sell out of the existing copies. But the historic stuff -- including some of the pamphlet-sized items -- could all be set up for POD. I think I've identified one of my projects for the year. A big advantage of leaving the printing and order fulfillment to a 3rd party is that I don't have to deal with a resale license or filling out sales tax forms. And a brief check of sample pricing indicates that the production costs are comparable to or lower than the run-them-off-at-the-xerox-shop costs.

Why I didn't twig on this idea long ago is a mystery to me.

Yesterday I carpooled down to Monterey with a co-worker to attend another co-worker's wedding. ( Hey, why not review a wedding? )

I've taken the next step in my Scheduled Blind Date Program by posting the following item on the local Craig's List: ( Read more... )

The same offer is also open to any of my LJ readership, of course!

Dateline: Seattle Washington; No miles counted (used Bill & Eden's car); Current location of writing: Bill & Eden's house

( Wherein I fulfill cultural and culinary goals. )

I want to go on record as being extremely in favor of the rule changes that now allow female figure skaters to skip the silly little skirt thingies (if they want to) and wear outfits that show off their magnificent bodies to extreme advantage. Like that wonderful thing Slutskaya wore in the short program. Mmmmm. In my opinion, there's nothing sillier looking than a figures skater with her alleged "skirt" fluttering up around her waist.

The journal isn't getting much of me at the moment because I'm in the middle of a two-week stand with the Winter Olympics. I love the Olympics. I love the fact that they've stopped insisting on the female figure skaters all wearing little fake skirty things. Some still do, but now there's a choice. I'm amused by the difference in demeanor between the athletes in newer "extreme" sports and those in the more "traditional" sports. I have to say I prefer the more dignified "traditional" approach, but it's interesting to see the range of behaviors.

The last little bits of the mortgage/house business are settling themselves out. Money has been transferred to my parents' account and they have the quitclaim deed to get notarized. We still need to officially dissolve the partnership, but I need to check out some legal advice on that part. This evening I sent off the payoff for my student loan, so the mortgage will be my only long-term debt.

The brief warm spell has faded, but I stuck to my decision to get back to bicycling to work again. The days have lengthened enough that it's still reasonably light even after I'm done at the gym, if I leave work promptly and don't have any other errands. Another month, and there'll even be enough daylight when I get home to start putting in some yard time before getting to the housework.

Has it really been nearly a week since I posted? I guess without mortgage issues to bitch about, I don't have much to say. (Nah.) ( Read more... )

We've had wonderful spring-like weather this week. I'm all set to switching over to bicycling to work again starting next week, although they say that we may have rain moving in again soon. This is probably a Good Thing since it's much too early to entice the plum tree into blooming. One of the almonds has already gone off, but they're a lot hardier about spring storms. Tomorrow I'm hoping to get around to installing a few more cinderblocks in the driveway. Xrian brought over a load of some she was trying to get rid of last month but someone seems to have decided that since they were sitting next to the trash cans, I was trying to get rid of them too. (When I mentioned this at work, one of my co-workers gave this long-suffering sigh and said, "You are way too willing to believe the best of people." Well, no, I'm not. But I like to practice giving the world the benefit of the doubt. I find it extremely exhausting when people are always jumping to the worst possible interpretation of things.)

Wonderful Olympics opening ceremonies last night. ( Read more... )

Now I'm busy setting up my VCR schedule for the week.