freewaydiva | Reading

I like a themed event / feast; it gives me springboards to menu ideas (as well as the occasional rabbit hole). For various reasons, the theme for the 2025 Yule Ball was "The Seven Seas".

Rabbit hole: Apparently the earliest known appearance of the term "The Seven Seas" is from a 2300 BCE Sumerian hymn; I'm still searching for it. It seems that each seafaring culture had a different definition of the Seven Seas, Greeks and Romans, Arabs and Persians, etc. So, the first element could be vertical history of sorts - one course being for one seafaring culture / time. I knew pretty soon that I wanted both Roman and Viking in there, as well as early Medieval and Arabic (the latter because I have a soft spot for the al-Warraq).

The second question was, What were people eating while, as it were, sailing the Seven Seas? This became a mix of google searches and common sense - dried and pickled foods, supplemented with fresh food in ports; food that was as long lasting as possibe. Fish, definitely. Pulses, possibly. Biscuits seemed to be a staple even early on. I don't think there would have been livestock on ships - they eat a lot and poop a lot for relativey little return - although I will happily stand corrected if someone has further / other information.

Just for fun I started to look for ship names for each course. Thetis for Roman because why not a water goddess. Visund, the name of King Olaf Haraldsson's ship, for the Norsemen. A google search for Medieval ship names turned up a site by an SCA friend of mine which delighted but absolutely not surprised me; of course Ari Bona has a page for this. From that page I chose by sound - Hynde and La Trinitee.

Realistically speaking, the third thought is of course whether the dishes will be tasty and go well together; the fourth whether it is doable in the site kitchen in the time availble and within budget. Stockfish was right out.

So, I had my scaffolding; now to fill it with recipes.

To be continued...

nuncheon

Reader, Stuff Happened.

It's been almost four years to the day that I last posted in this blog. I continued to cook at SCA events until at the end of 2023 I decided to take a a sabbatical. I was too close to the trees to see the forest, and I felt I had over-extended myself. Events in Real Life did not help either, and it seemed like a good idea to take some time off to re-group. For most of that sabbatical I didn't even touch the cookbooks much; the exception was a pure cooking-based event in 2025 which re-kindled the flame; more on that possibly later here.

This meant that when I was again cooking feast at the end of 2025 for Yule Ball, our traditional SCA winter event, I was able to tackle everything with a fresh and much more relaxed mind, which translated into a fun kitchen.

It's surprisingly hard to re-start this blog since it has been languishing for so long, especially since I have not yet decided on a cookbook to pursue, try out, and write about. What I think I'll do in the meantime and until I find the next cookbook to glom on to is re-visit what I have done so far in the way of cooking at events, the menues and sources and adaptions, which may amuse and entertain.

I'll start with the most recent as it's fresh in my mind, but that is a post for another day.

ursula

A couple of recent newsletter posts:

This one has a link to my Romancing the Vote offering, an annotated copy of North Continent Ribbon, and a couple of photos of model ships made during the Napoleonic Wars.
This one starts with some notes about why newsletters cost money and ends with information about how to criticize a proposed rule that would give US political appointees total control over science funding.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Folks may have noticed that the site has been slow for logged-out users over the last while. This is partly because we separate traffic by logged-in, "logged out but have visited the site before", and "logged out, never visited the site before" and assign the fewest resources to the last category (because we're pretty confident the overwhelming majority of it is bot and scraper traffic, even if it's often impossible to say for sure). The flood of garbage traffic is a plague and a scourge the entire internet is dealing with, and it's hitting small sites the hardest as operators get better and better at cloaking their requests to look like real, authentic use. We long ago hit the point where adding more resources is a possible solution (because they just eat them up as soon as we do), and splitting traffic lets us keep the site usable for our actual users without wasting too much server power on garbage.

We've now, lucky us, reached the point where the "logged out, have never visited the site before" path is just flooded all the time, and the "logged out but have visited the site before" path is suffering some of the overflow. We've made some changes to the routing to try to improve things for logged out users who have visited the site before and keep it at "it may be a little bit slow, but at least it works" instead of "it keeps timing out", and we've seen some improvements, but if you're accustomed to browsing the site while logged out, I'm really sorry but it may continue to be a little miserable.

You will get the fastest page loads and the best performance by browsing the site logged in. If you are having trouble loading the front page to log in, bookmark the direct login page. We can't route the front page to the "more power" server pool, because it's a common target for garbage traffic, but we've switched /login over to "more power" and we'll try to keep it there as long as we can unless it starts getting slammed, too.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30

Y'all have a lot to say

Reading

The Seven Seas - Part 1

First, invent the universe

(no subject)

(no subject)

Profile

November 2025

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags