Feaux Feast #1

Written on Monday, Jan. 30th, 2012. Texas.

John and I got jobs with a lady who runs the feasts here at Sherwood. We’re both servers. It’s a part-time weekend job, only about 4 hours a week. Because of that, we’re not paid in cash, but we’re working off our passes to the faire. We also get all the free food we can eat after the feasts. It’s not a bad gig, because I just found out today that I can make money by selling my steel products at the faire’s consignment booth, which is run by my boss. John’s fixin’ to either get a steadier job, or be a runner around the feasts, which actually pays pretty good here, according to what we heard.

This weekend we had a mock-feast for the cast. Since we didn’t have to show up to work in garb until 3pm, we spent the morning crackin’ out on Magic (No Drama is the very first house rule) with the boys in the green army tent. Actually, only John played. I couldn’t hold still long enough to get into a game. That, and we were all distracted for a couple of hours watching the neighbor first bury his RV, then the two trucks, then about five hippies in sugar sand. They finally managed to pull and push the RV out of the sand pit they’d dug. Manually.

Seriously, I need to get a cheap digital camera and keep it on me at all times, I swear.

I wandered off to charge my computer and write. Squatch and his girl were gone to a gun show in Austin and their puppy squeezed out of their yurt and was out runnin’ around off leash. So I coral him back to his house and put him on a leash. I would have put him back in the yurt – it wasn’t locked – but I knew the old dog, Kiwi, was in there guarding the house. No way was I going in there. Squatch gives her a command in Apache and she’ll go into the house and sit with her nose to the door. She’ll shred anyone who isn’t Squatch who walks through that door. She may be an old dog, but she’s an old dog with a history of toppling bulls and ripping out the throats of coyotes.

So I put the puppy on his lead and went to walk back to my house. He whimpered after me and next thing I new he come runnin’ up to me, off his lead and no collar on. So I lead him back and find that his collar came unbuckled. I put him back on, made him lie down, calm down, and told him to stay. After a minute of squirming, he calmed down, and when I let him up he wandered over to the yurt, sat as close to the door he could get and didn’t make a peep after that.

Once or twice, while charging my computer and writing on the other side of the fence, I caught him attempting to squeeze through the wall into the yurt and I made him knock that nonsense off. He’s a quick dog, it didn’t take more than me getting between him and the yurt and scolding him, “You KNOW you’re not supposed to do that!” He knew and he quit that game.

Around 2pm I grabbed John and we took our first showers here. The showers are nice, certainly roomy enough for two folks to shower at the same time. There’s three narrow stalls with a bench in each. There’s no roof, and the walls are open eighteen inches from the ground, so it’s cold when one is awaiting one’s turn at the water and a breeze comes through. The water is hot, though, and the pressure is touchy, but decent. We had to take a quick shower, so I couldn’t enjoy it as much as I’d’ve liked.

We showed up to work in our garb a little bit early. Ma (that’s what everybody calls the cute old lady that’s our boss) was running about almost like a chicken with its head cut off managing everything. Her cooks had food coming out right and left that needed to be prepared to ship up to the feast hall.

She first sent us up to the feasting pavilion to help out the guys put up a big gazebo for serving the food. Well, we misunderstood and went to the wrong pavilion. The folks putting the tent up at this place told us they had it, so we went and hung out at the kitchen and help there. I cut some cheese and made us some black forest and cheddar sandwiches – we’d barely eaten a thing all day).

Finally she sent us back up to the pavilion to deliver something and that’s when we found out that we were completely at the wrong pavilion. We found the right one, where they were just finishing up with the gazebo. Oops! We helped them finish and apologized for getting lost, heh. Everything happened fast after that. We loaded up a truck with our supplies and drove up to the Feast just as the cast showed up and started up their entertainment routine.

We served hummus and chips, cheese and grapes for the appetizer and followed with a course of this tomato bisque in a bread bowl, which hit off very well. I forgot a couple of the patrons spoons – oops! again! – but they had just an easy time eating the soup with their forks or bits of the bread bowl (that’s howl they did it back in the day, anyhow). Next came grilled sausages, grilled vegetable medley, corn on the cob. Then came the coup de gras, the roasted cornish game hens, roast beef, and classic ratatoui and roasted portabella mushroom caps for the vegans in the bunch. We offered dark bread between courses. For desert, we served a delicious banana custard pudding with vanilla wafers, served in a waffle bowl. The chef made the pudding with “yard eggs” (free-range hobby birds) so it came out tinged a tiny bit green, but not, however, in an unappetizing shade.

Normally, this is where we end the feast, but we had a birthday cake course for a birthday girl. Unfortunately, by the time the fifth course came around, everyone was full beyond belief and only three folks partook of that delicious pineapple cake. That meant that all the employees got to take home a bit of cake (I ate mine for breakfast, yum!)

It all ran so smoothly. All that was required of us was to serve the food, thanks to the feast coordinator who announced each dish as it came out so we didn’t have to explain each dish to each patron ourselves. The food stayed hot, we received nothing but the highest praise for the food and service, and the entertainment was cute (they actually had a magic show with white doves, and one of the doves kept trying to either escape, or, as one of us put it, “Incite the others to riot!” Yar!). Afterward there was plenty enough for all of us to engorge ourselves on. After cleaning up we hung out in the kitchen smoking in celebration, drinking and eating and laughing and having a really good fun time.

I brought home enough leftovers to eat myself into a coma the next morning!

All in all, this feasting business is going to be lovely. I already adore my co-workers. I was a tad nervous, as I am always when dealing with customers face-to-face at a new job, but I’ll get used to that once I understand what is expected of me, and how much I can get away with, heheh. I have to remind myself that this is a Rennie food establishment, and I’m not dealing with a stuck-up, self-centered, asinine corporation. It’s so nice!

Peace!