Dear dueSouth fandom: I didn't say this last time it got on my nerves, but now that I have actually written some dueSouth fic, I am going to:

Stop writing Kowalski as the experienced old hand with undercover work and Vecchio as the newbie in over his head! Vecchio was originally assigned to work with the Mountie because he'd been doing too much undercover, and the Lieu wanted to make him be himself for awhile! He spent the first several episodes after that trying to get away with doing more undercover work! Yeah, they kind of dropped that thread a quarter of the way through the first season, but he was at least as addicted to it as Kowalski!

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Anyway, I don't think I've mentioned it here, but at the end of this week I am going to Pennsic War - the massive two-week-long SCA medieval reenactment encampment - for the third year in a row. (I'm not actually an SCA member, but it's two weeks of camping for way cheaper than I could manage at a state park, surrounded by geeky do-it-yourselfers and amateur historians and people who like learning just because they can, plus a bunch of my friends and relations are there anyway, so, yeah.)

I spent a few hours this evening doing the final version of the recipe book for this year. I'm sharing meals with two other people, and we're being pretty informal with it, so I'm writing out a week or so's worth of dinners that can be made with the ingredients we brought, so that if any of us get hungry we will know what we can cook.

I declared myself in charge of the food because, well, it's fun! And it's an excuse to keep collecting historical cookbooks. We have whatever we bring with us, no refrigeration, a very limited farmer's market on site, a Coleman stove, a communal campfire (some nights) and strong encouragement to avoid modern convenience foods.

Since they let me make the menus, our food box is probably about half oatmeal, cornmeal, rice, and beans. The goals were: cheap, easy, durable, filling, using minimal different ingredients, and somewhat timeless. Exactly my kind of thing! Plus one of the other people who has to eat it has almost no sense of taste, and the other one once lived on nothing but instant mashed potatoes for six months, so I don't have to feel nervous about messing up. I'm going for something vaguely like what medieval peasants might have had for a week at a fair (heavily adapted, mostly for cheapness, and with a lot of Colonial American somehow getting in.) Also most of these have meat, since the folks I'm sharing with are carnivores, but in most of them the meat can be left out (or replaced with salt) no problem. Since I was typing them up anyway, I thought I'd share.

( Seven dinners, plus extra )

...I should probably write up the lunch/drink/dessert/breakfast/pre-made portions of the Pennsic Cooking Notes too, but I am out of motivation, and these are the only ones that really needed to be legible :P