But I wouldn’t want you think I’ve been ignoring this blog. No, I’ve been getting ready for an event that’s fairly important to me, and now that the event has come and gone, I can write about it. You see, this past week (well, five days) has been the West/An Tir War, which for me is terribly important because that’s when the Cooks’ Playdate happens.

The Playdate is the brainchild of my friend Donna (known in the SCA as Duchess Juana) and it’s basically a camp’s worth of people who come together from a variety of kingdoms for this slightly-longer-than-usual camping event to cook medieval food, in as medieval a fashion as can be arranged. It’s on a lovely site, surrounded by hills next to the coast of Oregon, which means it’s delightfully cool while California temps are sweltering.

This get together does a great deal to “recharge” my cooking mojo, especially a love for medieval cooking. Cooking with medieval gear takes a considerable investment in time and effort, and doing it while hanging out in a crowd who feel the same way is…special.

So, this year we had some regulars missing due to life, a whole mess of new people, and still, the A-game was brought. In times past, we’ve had folks who built (with various degrees of success) an oven on site. This time, the oven was SPECTACULAR. Our fancy dinners were some of the best I ever had. And I think everyone had as big a blast as I did. I know people who innocently wandered past our camp were pretty amazed by what we were doing.

Usually, I miss a lot of what happens elsewhere on site, being focused on cooking, but this year, except for some time spent at the Front Gate, and a very little time wandering the merchant area, I stayed entirely in camp to cook. I took some nine pages of recipes to try (no, I didn’t think I’d do them all, but this gave me options), and after set up day, I dove right in.

So, my next three posts from me will be about each of the active days (you probably don’t care about the art and science of driving to site, setting up, tearing down, and driving home). In addition, I HOPE that some of my friends from this event, especially those who cooked from the Transylvanian cookbook, hint, hint, will send me their write ups to post.