I'm back - and it's nice to be home again, even if both my ventures were absolutely fantastic. The weather was fabulous, the people were incredibly nice, there was delicious food both in South Tyrol and in Vienna, and the conference in Vienna went very well.

It was, to my great delight, a different crowd from "the usual" - since I often go to archaeological or experimental archaeological conferences, or to textile archaeology conferences, you sort of start knowing a lot of the people who turn up there. Which is very nice and enables one to re-connect and catch up with each other, but on the other hand limits new input you can get. This was quite different this time, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. As well as the lovely reception we got given in Vienna town hall and the Grand View tour on the rooftop of the Natural History museum (with the most splendid weather imaginable) - and of course meeting some of my friends again.

And then I came back from the conference in Vienna to a garden that is slowly filling up with blooming spring flowers and fantastic weather. Now I only have to get through the gazillion emails in my in-box and get back on track for the things that need to be done urgently... which includes the fine-tuning of plans for the IRM the coming weekend. Which I might just do sitting in the garden this afternoon, since it is pretty warm and sunny! These are the joys of being a freelancer...

I'm off to meet friends, celebrate the anniversary of the ArcheoParc in Val Senales, my mum's birthday, the successful reconstruction of three Hallstatt bands in Vienna and speak at the 3000 years of colour conference. All during the next ten days or so.

Which means, of course, that I will spend most of the time somewhere else - with just a short pit stop here inbetween travels. And this means no blogging for this time.

I will be back on March 26, after having had fun and adventures and good times, and I hope you will have those too!

Doc, over at Medieval Cookery, posted a nice entry titled "The Measure of a Cook".
The TL;DR: Measuring helps, and even if an experienced cook does not measure using an item, there's still some hand-eye-measuring going on. Pure "cooking from the heart", when done by a novice, can go spectacularly wrong due to lack of this built-in measuring and lack of experience of how something should look, feel or behave. And when we are talking about historical recipes, most of us, even experienced cooks, will count as novices since we just don't know how the concoction described in the text was supposed to behave and taste.

I find Doc's observations very true - measuring really does help, and it is more important if you lack experience with the kind of food you are trying to prepare. On the other hand, I have made the experience that some (novice) cooks will stick to a given recipe down to the last letter, including perfectly substitutable or omissable ingredients even if they do not like their taste at all. And that is... not so good either.

I am one of those lucky folks who got a good grounding in how cooking works back at home, when I was quite young. The first thing I learned how to cook was noodle soup - because it is so easy. You put in some stock, get it to boiling, just add noodles and wait a few minutes. I also remember, vividly, that I made some on my working mini child's play stove one day, and then forgot about it until it had cooked to noodles, no soup. (It was still edible, though.) I was sad about that - and then got told that yes, things like that just happen once in a while when you cook, and it's no big deal.

I learned that it's good to have a recipe with measurements as a guideline, but that they are not set in concrete, and it is perfectly okay to experiment a little, or to substitute ingredients if you do not have or do not like something. And that once in a while, things will not turn out quite as they should - but that those failures are just a part of life, and most times the food will still be edible if not very yummy, and in our age it's not too big a deal. (It was back in post-war times. My gran tells this story where someone found a pot of grease left by US soldiers and used it to fry a portion of potatoes in it. Unfortunately, it was non-edible grease for leather, and thus the fried potatoes were non-edible as well. That was a really, really big deal.)

When I started to cook stuff for groups while not in the safety of my home kitchen - especially out on living history ventures - I started seeing measurements even more as guidelines. I remember making dough for waffles without any measuring tools apart from counting out four eggs and adding other stuff until the consistency was about right, and the waffles turned out really well. But yes, that is only possible when you know how a given sort of dough should look, or what the right consistency for this or that is. And then you do measure with your eyes and hands and experience.

A friend who was a professional cook once told me "Augenmaß und Handgewicht verläßt die deutsche Küche nicht" (measuring by eye and weighing in the hand will not leave the German kitchen), and I say this to myself whenever I'm not going to measure - because I do not have the implements, or because I am feeling frisky. And I have some recipes that just state what the ingredients should be and how they should be treated and combined, but no amounts - because when I make that Irish Stew or that "Szegediner Gulasch", I will buy and cook an amount of potatoes, peas and carrots to fill the bellies and an amount of meat that will add flavour and interest but will not empty my pocket too much.

And today I'm feeling really lucky that I have learned this approach to cooking. Thanks, Mom. And Dad. And Gran.

It is March 14 - 3/14 in the US notation. And since 3.14 are the first three digits of π, that makes today the Official Pi Day.

Just in case you are not a maths person, π (pi) is used to calculate, among other things, the circumference of a circle or the volume of a cylinder. Which will be a good thing to know if, say, you are doing the maths for building a spinning wheel. Or calculating the drive ratio of your wheel, and figuring out how to change it to a ratio you want. Or calculating weight and MI of spindles from a given material for a spinning experiment. Plus - I love pie. The edible kind.

If you're now frantically looking for some way to celebrate Pi Day, you can find some more information on this website. Look under "Pi Stuff" to find amusing snippets of all sorts. Or just prepare your favourite pie recipe and celebrate pi day. (And if you need an excuse for a prolonged lunch break or very early coffee break, you can always say you need to celebrate Pi Day at the correct time - at 1.59 pm.)

I have a stack of things to read, I have to pack and prepare for a visit to a friend on the weekend, there's an almost finished presentation that I need to go through a few more times and wrap up, and I have dentist appointment in an hour.

In other news, our garden looks much different - not only due to spring now finally coming and doing stuff to the plants, but also because we ripped out an old evergreen hedge which will be replaced by something not-evergreen, not as wide and not as dense as the old one, to let a little more light and a feeling of a larger space live in our garden. A few of our friends came on Saturday to help us with this, and together we managed to remove all the hedge plants - a little more than 25 metres of hedge, so we could all feel we had done some work in the evening.

Unfortunately, the hedge is not the only thing that will not see the next spring - the little rosemary plant we bought last year has not survived the winter with its quite extreme temperatures. I'm a little sad, but I hope this is the only freeze death in the garden - there are a few other plants which are not yet getting back into the action, so it will stay interesting on that front.

To even out these losses, the offset bulbs of all the tulips I replanted last autumn (to give them a little more space) seem to happily live and grow in their various new spots now. And the first three sunflower seedlings have finally broken through the soil in my nursery pots. Plus we now have a red currant plant. I grew up with several red currant plants in our garden, and strawberries and raspberries and cherries, and while I can live without a cherry tree if necessary (and buy cherries at the market) I really miss the other three when I do not have them in the garden.  So things are looking up now, currant-wise. Hooray!

On Saturday, March 10, a castle in Slovakia - Krasna Horka - was badly damaged due to fire. Cause of the fire was possibly burning grass on the slopes close to the castle that somehow managed to ignite the wooden roof shingles.

The castle was a tourist attraction and newly restored - it only opened again for the public last year. It contained a museum as well - now probably mostly lost. It's a tragedy - and one that has been handled like all tragedies are handled in our age: it has been filmed.



So if you have always wondered what it looked like when a castle burned in the past - you can now watch and see. (There are plenty more videos on youtube about it, by the way.)

h/t to schmalenstroer's blog

In spite of my giving sometimes a very different picture, I am not always a very orderly or organised person. Yes, I like to be prepared for stuff, but sometimes things escape me. And sometimes I just let a "that should work... somehow... possibly" solution go on way, way too long.

I have just finished sorting all the stuff I took home from the conferences of the past years. Usually, you get handed a little something - a bag or even a canvas bag or a folder - stuffed with a little info about the place you are, the conference programme, museum leaflets, an attendants address' list, and other papery stuff. Now, I have solved the note-taking-and-finding conundrum some years ago when I started to write down all notes from a conference in a single book I made just for that purpose. The papery stuff handed out? I had put them into a magazine file thingie to keep them all together somehow. I have now put all of it (including older notes and stray notes taken on loose leaf paper) into one large ring binder, sorted by conference, and gotten rid of all the old ad leaflets and brochures. And that made me realise... I went to a lot of conferences during those last years. I suspect I may have missed one or two, but during the last years, I almost always went to two conferences each year.

Now I only need to find all the printed-out or scribbled-down notes for the different presentations I gave at the various conferences and put those into a ring binder... and I will be all sorted and have a new, nice, relatively future-proof system. Whew.