It's the time of the year when the first events come closer and closer, and with them the flurry of activity for preparation. We bought a new pot last year, for instance, and spent an hour on Sunday afternoon preparing it for use.

I was taught that iron cookware, whether cast iron or sheet iron, needs seasoning or breaking in ("frying in", the Germans call it) before use. This, of course, does not apply to stainless steel... but iron? It will definitely win by this.

The seasoning is done by frying potato in fat (I used sunflower seed oil) with salt, after previously cleaning the new pan or pot with hot water and some dish soap or other suitable detergent. The goal is to coat the small irregularities in the surface - and that can be done with polymerised fat and carbon black. There are instructions on the internet to use potatoes cut into slices, but you can just as well use potato peels for the frying, and then use your freshly seasoned thing to have some nice fried potatoes.

And in case you want them right here, right now, the short instructions for doing it: Heat up the clean pan, adding the fat (should be fat suitable to high temperatures!). Heat the fat until a potato peel dropped into it starts to sizzle; then add in all the peels and a generous amount of salt (which acts as a scrubbing agent). Move the stuff around in the pan, going on until all the potato is nice and black, and ideally, the bottom of your pan or pot should be darkened, too. That's all there is to it! The internet, of course, knows of a gazillion additional ways to do it, but that's the method I use, and it works well enough for me.

Plus I always get to remember that one time I was at a medieval market, and I went past the camp where a friend was... he hollered me and asked me if I would like to have some potato stew, they had plenty left over. Now, that group is one that usually cooks medieval-ish, so potatos were really surprising me. It must have shown on my face, as I was promptly told that a whole bunch of folks from that group had bought new frying pans on the market, and had wanted to break them in right away, for which they needed... potato peels. Which did explain the unexpected potato stew, since they ended up with a lot of peeled potatoes that way. (Very tasty, by the way.)

Oh, and once your thing is fit for use, clean the pan by wiping it with a rag or rinsing it with water. If there's stuff stuck to it, you can also salt it down: Heat a handful of salt in the pan, moving it around until it is brown and your pan is clean. That are the preferred cleaning methods for seasoned iron that I know.
You can use soap or dish soap if really necessary, but use it sparingly - it will take away from the seasoning. And use? Makes your cookware better. So bring on these fried foods...

Every quarter of the year, I have to file some tax stuff... and guess what? It's time for that. Which is... taxing.

Well, it's not that bad, but it will require some coffee, and possibly some chocolate. While I deal with this and with the backlog of emails and writing and stuff so I can finally get caught up (in my wildest dreams, this happens today), why don't you have a few photos?

... a closeup of the fillet in the Manesse-Style:


... and since you all seem to like those buttons as much as I do:




 ... and finally some gratuitous cat pictures. Because I know what the Internet wants (and I confess that I had a need for them as well). 


That was the piccie part.

If you want more to read instead of cat and button pics, there's a list of 550 archaeological blogs over at Archaeologik - in different languages, many of them English.

Also, this Saturday is International Tabletop Day - see the tabletop day webpage if you want to find a game shop or gaming place in your area.

As promised, here is the recipe for the vegan low-carb (well, relatively - this obviously will contain carbohydrates) chili... with tofu brought to within an inch of its life. I will give you a more normal amount of ingredients than what I made, though.

Three-and-a-half-bean vegan Chili

soak dry beans over night:
65 g kidney beans,
65 g white beans,
65 g pinto beans,
30 g chickpeas

For the tofu crumbles:
400 g tofu, finely crumbled

for the marinade:
2 tblsp ground ginger (dried)
1 tblsp garlic, finely chopped
cayenne pepper
6 tblsp. tahini
2-3 tblsp. maple syrup
50 ml soy sauce
water as needed

olive oil

and the rest:

20 g dried tomatoes
1 small onion
2-3 packets of tomato puree or tomato pieces (finely chopped)
1 small bell pepper, cut into small pieces
1 can of corn

salt, cinnamon, cocoa (the dark unsweetened stuff for baking), maple syrup, chili

Mix marinade together and mix in the tofu; let sit for about 2 hrs (or longer). Soak dried tomatoes in water. Boil the soaked beans until done, about 45 min to 1 hr should do the job (do not add salt!).
Place tofu onto a baking sheet with generous amounts of olive oil and put into the oven (fan assisted, 170°C). Turn every 10-15 mins, until tofu is really brown and crisp.
Fry the onion in olive oil until nicely browned, add tomato puree. Cut dried tomatoes into small pieces, add together with their bath water.  Add salt, cinnamon, about 1 tblsp cocoa powder, about 2 tblsp maple syrup, and chili to taste. Let simmer for at least one hour. (For the large batch, I simmered the chili in one packet of tomato, on the side - that allowed to add in as much of the spicy tomato stuff as needed later on, and avoided accidental too-hot-ness.)

Drain the cooked beans, add drained beans and tofu to the tomato sauce, add drained corn and the bell pepper. Mix well, re-heat, enjoy.

Sometimes life throws you a challenge. My current challenge (well, the non-work-related one) is... vegetarian chili. That's not too bad, you say? That depends, I say.
I've made chili before, and it's basically an easy dish. But the version I'm going for now is actually low-carb vegan chili, due to several different persons with several different food issues that I would like to feed at the same time, out of one pot. And I am, very much, a meat person. I like the strong tastes and the taste mixture of meat with beans and tomato in a chili, very much so. I also like the texture of minced meat in the chili. And while beans are not that high in carbohydrates, they are high enough that I felt a need to put in something beside bean and tomato. Well, apart from my being sort of suspicious that it would be a little... bland otherwise.

So yesterday, I've bought tofu for the first time in my life, and though I've eaten tofu before (not much of that though) I have found out, this morning, why so many recipes talk about marinating it before using it. There was that time, at a living history event, when a piece of wood whittled off of something had fallen into my food bowl. (There's perils as well as joy in sharing camp with a very dedicated woodworker.) Wood, let me tell you, at least when it's fresh and not a weird wood like strongly resinated pine or juniper, tastes like... nothing. Sort of blandness personified.

The only difference to that piece of tofu I tried this morning? (I tried it raw and straight out of the bag, because I am a daring person and wanted to know how bad it possibly could be.) The wood was harder to chew. And probably contained less protein. So at the moment, a bit of tofu is hanging out in some marinade, and later on I shall put a bit of it into a pan and fry it to within an inch of its life... and then see whether my chili project will fly, walk, crawl, or jump over a friendly cliff into the ocean and sink like a stone.

(In the event that it should fly, I promise you the recipe. Should it totally tank, I will never speak of it again, though... so if you want a recipe, keep your fingers crossed for me!)

The phone, I blame the phone for eating up almost all my morning! Now I'll quickly give you today's links:

De Gruyter has bought up Versita, now called de Gruyter Open. This part of dG will offer open access articles and journals, their start page is here.

And, to (semi-)quote* the webcomic Questionable Content: Baking is science for hungry people. If that makes you hungry for some baking science, head over here to learn everything you ever wanted to learn about chocolate chip cookies.

* It's a semi-quote because there is merchandise with that phrase, but to my knowledge, it doesn't turn up in a comic.

There is the odour of the season gently wafting through our rooms - smells of baking, of chocolate and nuts and butter. This weekend saw a fair bit of baking - including that of a friend who currently has no kitchen and joined in with his cookie-baking hereabouts, so the oven really did work for its keep. Now we're about finished with the making of all the cookies and goodies for the Xmas coffee table - just two more kinds to go, one of them designed to use up the egg-whites that get left over from other kinds of cookies.

I do the quite-traditional German style baking, where you have one kind of basic cookie dough and turn it into different kinds by adding diverse yumminess enhancers - such as sour (red currant) gelee between two cookies and then coating the top with chocolate. Or doing the same, but with praline (what the Germans call Nougat) instead of the jam. Or adding marzipan to them, stuck onto a single cookie with help of more praline. And then leaving a few ones plain, too - makes four kinds of different cookies from one kneading and baking.

Should you want to join in the baking craze, here's one post with previous recipes, and here is the recipe for the Lemon Thingies.

And because it's almost traditional by now to share a recipe with you at about this time of year, here is one that I took into the canon of things to bake in the season last year: Chocolate-coffee-nut-spheroids. It's one of the "use up your leftover egg whites" recipes - typical German butter cookies call for more egg yolks than whole eggs, so you are saddled with egg whites. I store them into a lock&lock box until I get around to using them; my sister once told me she also freezes them when she has to keep them for a longer while, or when she wants to save them for something larger involving more of the stuff later in the year. I usually base these recipes on 2 egg whites for writing them down, and then prepare double or triple this amount (depending on the number of whites, and the amount of final objects desired).

Chocolate-coffee-nut-spheroids

200 g mixed nuts (I usually go for a little less than a third walnuts, and the rest almonds and hazelnuts in about similar amounts), chopped not too finely
80 g sugar
100 g dark chocolate, molten
2 egg-whites
1/2 teaspoon instant coffee powder

2 drops bitter almond aroma
1 generous pinch of baking soda

Dissolve coffee powder in about 2 teaspoons of water, then add all the other ingredients. (The baking soda is not in there as a leavening agent, but to neutralise the acid in the coffee, which together with the walnuts can taste unpleasant to some folks.) With wet hands, form small spheres (I place a water bowl beside me to re-wet my hands as needed, and make the spheres about 1.5 to 2 cm in diameter).
Bake for 15 mins at 150° C (fan oven). After cooling, place into a tin to store. Or eat them right away. (Maybe not all of them at once, though...)

I love those little thingies. If you are going to bake them, I hope you'll enjoy them too!

The links have been piling up again, so here you go - a whole stack of them:

An article about the education of upper-class women in the Middle Ages - I found that very interesting.

Diachronic Design is a blog and webpage concentrating on computers in archaeology - there's not too much content yet, but it could be worthwhile to watch.

Pompeii is crumbling (German blog Archaeologik posts links to Italian articles about collapses).

Doug has done the roundup and synopsis of the (many!) answers to his first Blogging Archaeology Carnival, "Why do you blog".

In case you haven't seen the box-turns-something-else yet, here is the link. (I think this is way, way cool. The only question I have in regards to similar folding thingies is - where in hell do you put the mattress? You still have to store that somewhere, right? And it will be... bed-sized. So no actual space-saving takes place.)

The British Library has a medieval manuscripts blog, covering for example the marginalia of the Gorleston Psalter.

A very interesting post on sharing data: Archaeology and Github (over on Powered by Osteons).

And finally, a (German-language) repository and database of old cooking recipes, dated 1646 until the 20th century.

Enjoy!