Historical Kitchen Fun

I can't believe how busy it's been or at least seems to have been.   I thought after the fair demos things would settle down.   However it took a bit longer than that.   My car was acting odd on my last trip to Westfield and we took it in to get looked at and boy, were we lucky.   The hose to the transmission had worn and was leaking transmission fluid.   But it seems like we may have caught it in time and it was only $650 instead of $3000.   Hubby says this could be normal wear and tear.  I think though it's the excessive bouncing over the train tracks on the route I normally take to town.  The asphalt is always pitted and cracked around the tracks and you have to slow down to a crawl to go over them unless you are a huge farm vehicle with giant flat, seemingly solid tires!

Besides that, I've been dressing the floor loom and that is fodder for another post.   Just... next time.  I've made some socks.  I've planned a new Birka style bag on which I've planned some Bayeux stitch embroidery - also for another post.

A gorgeous and functional stove

However, last Sunday I took a cooking workshop at Dundurn castle.  It was much less a cooking workshop than a tasting class.   It was still fun though.   I got to cook on the stove which is a pretty awesome beast.   (Well, I stirred onions in a pan, but it's still cooking!)  It was about soups and it was quite informative.    I like the booklet we got, which has some new cookery sources in for me.   I also realized that the people running the  course are simply people like me, and while I didn't butt in or anything, I did know the answers to the information that they forgot.  There is another workshop coming up in December, on puddings, which could be fun, but it's a tad more expensive and I spent the rest of my discretionary, non- yarn budget inviting my daughter along with me.   I sure would like some other insight into steamed pudding though, considering the several recent failures I've had.

Some of the transferware in the kitchen

The soups were all easy to make and most were quite tasty.  Even though I'm not a huge fan of tomato soup, the fresh tomato soup was quite nice.  The pumpkin soup was good although I'd make it with broth instead of milk as the milk sort of overwhelmed the pumpkin flavour if that is possible.  The onion soup which I helped caramelize the onions for, was delicious but it was really just a lot of fried onions in broth.

There was a huge display of transfer ware.  I didn't get enough time to check out all the patterns, but gosh, it was beautiful.  I do love transfer ware and really wish I had a bit of time to check them out.

This is a picture of a cupboard in the kitchen which I really liked.   I could see this as a yarn cupboard - or yarn-oire which I've been asking for.   It was a decent size and would hold a lot of stuff, as well as keeping it out of sight.

The amount of period equipment in the kitchen was quite amazing.   It gave me a lot of ideas and inspiration.  In all, it was a good morning.   It did begin with the person escorting us into the kitchen telling us that the scaffolding on the outside was period in that in October of 1850something, they were planning for one of the daughter's weddings.  To make the house more grand looking, the front pillars were installed.   It was a fun bit of information to start the day.

Proof I got to use the stove!