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 Compost and Pasties As noted before (most recently in the previous post), most months some of the local SCA kids and I make food for our big shire day - the Flintmoot. This has been going on since 2022, and the most recent was last weekend. As always, the question is what to make? Sometimes we have a motivator, like last month's venison. Sometimes we don't. The closest thing I had to a motivator this week was a bunch of glass jars. So I though, what if we made some Compost, stuck it in jars, and let people take it home? I've done compost before, for an event at Tretower in 2017, called At the Mark. The recipe is this one: Compost. Take rote of persel, of pasternak, of rafens, scrape hem and waische hem clene. Take rapes & caboches, ypared and icorue. Take an erthen pa nne with clene water & set it on the fire; cast all þise þerinne. Whan þey buth boiled cast þereto peeres, & perboile hem wel. Take all þise thynges vp & lat it kele on a faire cloth. Do þerto salt; whan it is colde, do hit in a vessel; take vyneger & powdour & sa froun & do þerto, & lat alle þise thynges lye þerin al nyȝt, oþer al day. Take wyne greke & hony, clarified togider; take lumbarde mustard & raisouns coraunce, al hoole, & grynded powdour of canel, powdour douce & aneys hole, & fennel seed. Take alle þise thynges & cast togyder in a pot of erthe, & take þerof whan þou wilt & serue forth. Curye on Inglysch, Forme of Cury, Hieatt and Butler, pp. 120-121, #103 We had time constraints, and I was working with kids, so the recipe was a bit modified. We took parsnips, carrots, and cabbage and parboiled them. Then added some pear. When they were just about done, we pulled them off the fire, drained them, and salted them. When they cooled, we added some honey, currants, vinegar, prepared mustard, and some spices. I think it was mostly ginger, pepper, and clove. Probably some cinnamon. We stuck it in jars and called it good. I left the spicing in the hands of the young cooks, and they did a stellar job. When I was doing the shop for the compost, I found some mushrooms in the scratch-and-dent section. (By which I mean, the reduced in price since they are about to go out of date.) So I picked them up to experiment a bit with mushroom pasties. I've been messing about with Le Ménagier's mushroom pasties for over twenty years, just fiddling about. I first did them in 1999 or so when we were still in New York for an event called FightEatDance. We also did them last July at Flintmoot. The recipe we used then was this one, from the Greco and Rose edition (The Good Wife's Guide), which 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. The kids were a bit late arriving so I started with these on my own. I had it in my head to treat them like fried ravioli this time. I made a dough of flour and water, naught else, and rolled it pretty thinly. Some mushrooms, cut small, some grated cheddar (it was the cheese I had to hand), a bit of salt, and a bit of pepper. The pastry was closed and then fried. I made them on the largish side - perhaps 7cm by 15cm when filled and folded - and then cut them into slices for people to try. I quite liked them! When the kids arrived, they got stuck into making those in and around making the compost. I need to remember the fried ravioli idea, since that's something that could be used in the future. It's nice for working with multiple people since they can do a variety of fillings to their own taste. In fact, we ended up almost doing that this time. One of the junior cooks doesn't like mushrooms, so we made a few plain cheese ones at the end of the day. It's worth remembering the fried ravioli for regular home use, now that I think on it. As the day drew to a close, there was a spirited debate as to what each of the cooks should be called. The three kids couldn't quite agree on what they should be called respectively, but they all seemed to agree that I was the head chef, which was comforting.