Sunday, March 7, 2010

Regarding Winterfeast, pt 1: preparations

Warning: I fail at names. If I don't remember your name, it's not that I don't like you. I forget *everybody's* name.

Winterfeast was good. I went on the evening cooking crew after Anime, and we went to the apartments to chop things.
Carl and Susanna had just joined us for that evening, so basically none of it made sense, but they both seemed to like it. It's the sort of thing that's really entertaining, provided you leave your left brain at the door.

We couldn't find the dates for the Lombard anywhere, and the apartment was not intended for more than one or two people cooking/working at a time. We had four or five going at any one time. I spent most of the evening dicing potatoes, another guy made pasty crusts, and Susanna chopped dried fruit (which was really annoying, since the fruit stuck to the knife). Then we kicked back and relaxed with the movie and Twilight reading.

I went to bed at 2:00, then got up in the late morning, remembered winterfeast was today after checking my email leisurely, and headed down to Ketler kitchen as fast as I could. That was the biggest cooking area available, and we were using it for the pork roasts. We then headed down to the apartments to do the bulk of the cooking.

While I stepped out for lunch (we were waiting on potatoes to cook, which would take a lot of time and tie up all both of our big pots) they finished cooking the potatoes and making pasty filling: potato, cheese, onion, and some other stuff. I pretty much stuck to pasties for the rest of the day. Another guy and I (gah, can't remember his name even though I knew it at the time) assembled them all, then spent a bunch of time baking them.

Then came the next big task, once everything was cooked: moving everything. Now, for those of you who haven't seen the campus, it has two sections: upper and lower. Upper campus has the academic buildings, dining halls, and dorms. Lower campus has the athletic fields and apartments. Now, the apartments are on the absolute corner of lower campus - on main street, in fact. Also, "upper" and "lower" aren't just directional conventions. upper campus is a good bit higher than lower campus, and the apartment was on the fourth floor. Between us, it took two or three trips max. But what did I get the second trip, but nearly all of the juice for the punch? That's a lot of juice. Thank you to the visiting alum who got a pair of the larger bottles for me. I need to go out and walk more.

What made it nice is that it was getting warm enough for T-shirts, and it was sunny to boot. That meant that I forgot my coat in the apartment. By the time I realized, it was too late to go get it. This means I did not take pictures, because my camera was in my coat pocket.

After getting the bulk of the food there, it was time for the pork. Me and a couple others spent the next fifteen minutes running back and forth with trays of meat (which smelled REALLY GOOD). Then it was finally time to begin.