Thursday, March 03, 2005
It's Been a While
And during this blog-hiatus, we've written The Cauldron Crack'd, a cookbook focusing on Renaissance Faire Foods, RenFaire anecdotes, and a few historical recipes, too.
It's not by any means a scholarly piece, just ignore the pendantic prose and the excerpts from medieval texts. That's to appease the Authenticity Mavens who will be at the OU Medieval Faire, hovering over our shoulders and critiquing what we did.
The rest of the book is fun.
We're proofing it now for my inevitable typos (y'all are too kind and have overlooked them on this blog, but they shouldn't be in the book), and formatting it for Lulu.com.
That should all be done by this weekend.
On further news, I've been re-activating the Italian sourdough starters, Tri-Pliny and Quintina. They are more delicate than I'd hoped, so it may take another week or two before they are sturdy enough to bake with. Tri-Pliny seems very masculine in aspect - slow off the start, determined, and single focused. He ignores most of the variables (mostly temperature and humidity fluctuations), and if he reacts at all, it's a slow one that I can control better. I won't find he's blown through a feeding and collapsed of exhaustion the way Quintina does. I won't know for sure if Tri-Pliny is male until I bake with him.
Quintina, however, is indisputably female. I can tell even before baking with her. She's coy and needs lots of coaxing, but has an underlying sturdiness I haven't found in Tri-Pliny yet. She's variable and quick to react to circumstances, too. Be slow feeding her, and she collapses from starvation. A little food, though, and she's back to full vigor. She's such a drama queen!
I can't wait to taste Tri-Pliny and Quintina.
Yeast beasties are the only pet that thrives the more you eat of it. I bet a vat of sourdough was the original never-empty cauldron of fairytales.
