Not at all restful...

It was not at all a restful weekend. For the most part, Saturday was fun albeit exhausting. I wasn't so fond of setting an alarm for 6:30 on a Saturday but the ends justified the means. I did a few errands and then met up with Marian and Yseult at Yseult's house to start prepping food for the afternoon revel. We started getting an idea that we would have low attendance so we scaled back a bit but we still made some fantastic food. We didn't take many pictures, for which I am disappointed, but we found some fantastic recipes and combinations of foods. We have declared quinces in honey and cracked black pepper to be nearly ambrosia. It was fantastic paired with the pork slow cooked in hard cider. (We didn't share the quince butter, only having a small jar of it). We did present the chunked quinces as a dessert item topped with whipped cream.

Yseult made sauces- sorrel and camelin(?), rodkal, and torte bianca, mostly before I arrived. Marian's bread dough was rising when I arrived at 10:00. They'd already done six hours of prep work so it was mostly assembly Saturday morning.

I prepped sorrel to make a sorrel sauce for the pork. I prepped cilantro for period deviled eggs. I pealed eggs and I made up deviled egg recipe. It was a very interesting recipe. I don't like cilantro and I know there are others that don't so I divided the egg yolks in half and made half with cilantro and half with parsley. Pounding the herbage was a different experience but I could see that it really did make a difference. I don't remember the other ingredients other than salt, pepper, and vinegar, but I know there was at least one more spice. They did turn out nicely and the flavors melded gently as they sat. I still didn't like the cilantro ones but people who like cilantro did.

We had several roasted chickens (I think, since I only saw carcasses stewing for broth) that had been shredded. Our goal was to make hand pies of varying types so we made up three fillings. The pork filling had sage and something else (hrothgar1 can you help me fill in my blanks?). We had two chicken fillings; I was never quite clear about what was in the one I COULD eat other than parsley, but the one I couldn't eat had apricots, pistachios, parsley, zaatar (zaatar has walnuts which is why I couldn't eat it) and probably a few other ingredients. I know we used coriander in several recipes. After reading the recipes Marian concluded that wonton wrappers or egg roll wrappers were almost exactly what was being made, so we took a short cut. We put spoonfuls of meat into the wonton wrappers and sealed them (Period potstickers!). We also put a spoonful into bread dough and made filled buns. The wrapped meat was cooked in a couple of different fashions. We boiled first then baked, baked, and then we tried frying. It turns out that the first two methods did not produce an appealing texture so we fried them and they were quite delightful that way.

I then sliced up some apples and diced some candied blood oranges that Marian had canned the night before. I laid the apples out on the egg roll wrappers and added a sprinkling of the blood oranges then sealed the wrappers into a triangular shape. Frying turned out to be the best method of cooking these also and when drizzled with the syrup (was it quince or orange, Marian?) these were a little slice of heaven. I put a few of these into buns also but the wraps were so delicious we didn't get very far beyond them. We also offered the torte bianca (ricotta based cheese cake in a pie crust) for dessert. The rodkal (I need one of those Norwegian vowels but I can't figure out how to insert them) is a cabbage, apple, and leek dish that is baked at 300 degrees until the cabbage is soft. The apple makes it very sweet. It calls for butter but since I can't eat dairy we made a small pot with olive oil and it was quite good. The chicken and pork were available for eating plain or with the sauces. We rounded out the meal with cheese, bread, and a variety of pickles. The dozen or so people who joined us enjoyed it mightily and the kitchen crew even had some time to relax and throw a few rounds of darts.

With an attendance of only about a dozen we had way too much food, some of which will be re-purposed or frozen for other events but some of which was distributed to various households for immediate consumption. I delivered Marian to her doorstep about 8:30 and we were both tired and sore but it had been fun.

I was not quite prepared for my phone to ring at 6:30 Sunday morning but suspected immediately that it was an emergency. In fact, it was my mother telling me that they were transporting my father to the hospital with severe back and groin pain. She thought maybe it was a kidney stone but couldn't know. At 9:50 they still didn't know anything. His white cell count was still normal so not likely an infection. Through out the day, every test they ran came up normal or negative. His fever was over 103 when he arrived at the hospital so it's obvious there is something going on. We suspect that the pain and the fever are separate things but can't be sure of anything.

I postulate that when dad was trying to right the tipping wheelbarrow and fell, he probably pulled a muscle. When asked where the groin pain was, he was pointing to his upper thigh. When I reenacted the movements of his fall, I felt a strain in that area and wondered. When his fever gives him the chills and he begins to shiver, that muscle tightens and spasms trying to protect itself. But that is just my thoughts and I have no medical training.

The hospital discharged dad at about 3:00 with a non-specific diagnosis of viral syndrome. He was instructed to come back if his fever didn't go away in the next week, although the doctor wasn't at all certain where to go next for testing. Dad has a previously scheduled appointment with his regular physician on Tuesday so at least he'll see someone else in the intervening time. When I stopped by the house around 5:15 on Sunday he was sitting up and said there wasn't any pain in that position.

So, we still have no idea what is going on with him and it's worrisome.