Once a year the local SCA group has an informal gathering that includes a pie competition. "Pie" is pretty loosely defined. For today's I set out to make a ginger cheese pie, extrapolated from the cheesecake recipes in Digby and Platina. Basically, I used Digby's proportions for cheese, butter, and eggs, but replaced his cinnamon and nutmeg with ( Read more... )

Today at the Agincourt event byronhaverford received a writ for the order of the Chivalry and hildakrista received a writ for the order of the Pelican, both to be answered at baronial 12th night. Woo hoo! (These are both peerage orders, the highest honors the SCA gives out aside from the rank you earn if you sit the throne. Chivalry is for skill at arms and Pelican is ( Read more... )

This afternoon's barony meeting included a pie contest. Three categories were declared in advance: seasonal fruit, seasonal vegetable, and anything from a period source. Whimsy was also allowed, such as the geometrically-challenged rectangular apple dish. Until a few days ago I had been planning to enter a certain documentable apple/pear pie, ( Read more... )

( gaming )

Tonight we hosted a pot-luck dinner for about a dozen SCA people. We declared the theme to be 14th-century English. We should have asked people to register their intent to make ember-day tarts; we had three. :-) All different and all tasty; this is certainly not a complaint. I was just surprised. (This happens to us. One time we declared the ( Read more... )

Query to the brain trust: I have USB headphones that include a microphone. What free software can I use to record voice from that microphone (preferably on Windows XP but I also have an iBook with OS 10.4 available) and produce something like WAV files? (I know I'm not going to get stellar audio quality from this setup; that's ok. The immediate ( Read more... )

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I'm curious how other SCA groups with predictable influxes (this usually means students) handle the introduction. We have demos at the beginning of the school year on our two major college campuses, so the first general meeting in September doubles as the "talk to the people from the demos who were curious enough to come to the meeting" meeting.

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