I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on t he PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Cooking with the Kids Mushroom Pasties and Apple Tarts Our shire (Flintheath) has a monthly combination of A&S day, martial practice and business meeting at a local village hall. We've been doing these 'Flintmoots' for nearly three years now (my notes suggest the first was November 2022), and when we looked at the hall, I immediately noticed that there was a kitchen and said words to the effect of, 'Great, I can cook!' Within a month or two of that first meeting, it became clear that I was not the only one interested in cooking. We had a gang of four tweens, say 8ish to 10ish, who also wanted to cook. I thought, and still think, that this is great. So I started planning the cooking around things that would be interesting and fun for the kids to make, and which would also scale to a kitchen crew which, while small in stature, was often large in numbers for a small kitchen. I also wanted to get them started on medieval (or at least medieval-ish) cookery as early as possible. An early success was 'Glires falses', fake dormice, or as they have been known since their debut in 2005, 'meat mice.' It ticked all the boxes. In 2023, I brought a bunch of sauce recipes, and we made variations on those. We also had good fun with 'frytour of erbes' from the old standby, 'Forme of Cury.' I'm told that one of the crew, James, quite impressed his teachers by answering a question about his weekend with an explanation of medieval cookery and 'frytours of erbes.' (James also impressed a lot of people, including me, at our Du fait de cuisine event earlier this year.) Last weekend was another Flintmoot, and more cooking with the kids. It was to be a potluck, and so a bit more focussed that some of our rather free-wheeling adventures. I also had a reduced crew this time, since one of the gang has moved back to the US, and another was visiting family. I had with me James and his sister, two stalwarts, and as we cooked and afterwards, I was struck by how much they've grown, not just in size, but also in their confidence and ability to handle medieval-style recipes. At this Flintmoot, I showed up with ingredients, a recipe, and some vague ideas, and they did pretty much all the rest. Zeva, who has a bit of a sweet-tooth, was given some shortcrust pastry, honey, sugar, apples from our garden, and some spices and turned out a number of quite tasty apple tart variants. Not necessarily medieval, but not a million miles away, and working without a strict recipe with regard to quantities - which is very medieval. For James, I had opted for Le Ménagier's mushroom pasties. The Greco and Rose edition (The Good Wife's Guide), translates it thus: 160. Mushrooms one night old are the best. They are little and red inside, closed at the top. Peel and then wash them in hot water and boil. If you want to put them in a pasty, add oil, cheese, and powdered spices. Item, set them between two dishes on the coals and then add a little salt, cheese, and powdered spices. They are found at the end of May and in June. I provided some puff pastry (and flour and yeast, in case we needed more), mushrooms (chestnut and button), some cheese (cheddar and red leicester), and my house blend poudre fort - two parts of black pepper, to one part each clove and ginger. I showed him the recipe, the ingredients, and sat back to watch. He made folded pasties, and we also made a quick flatbread to top with the same 'filling.' They were delicious, and there were some leftovers, which I brought to the office for lunch. Where they were still delicious.