Feast.

Kristan wants me to provide a Redwall feast for her birthday. I recently read the Compleat Anachronist edition on how to prepare a feast, so I should be able to handle this, right? And it's just for my family, so that's not a lot of pressure.

The budget is up to $20. Which is to say, we have tons of food storage and ingredients in the house that I can access, so if there's an ingredient I REALLY want to use that we don't have, I'll have to buy it myself. I've looked at the list of Redwall food and found quite a lot of options that use only the ingredients I already have, so really it all depends on if I want to make cheese from scratch, in which case I'd have to buy more milk. And I like using my newly-forged cheesemaking skills, so I'll probably do that.

I have the food divided into 6 categories: Main dish, bread, cheese, side dish, drink, and dessert. I'm now at the very tricky part of choosing exactly what to make.

If I must say so myself, this is a pretty big birthday present. Since my mom dislikes cooking, perhaps I should offer to do this for her Christmas present.

After I'd chosen a large list of candidates, I went through and highlighted 2-4 in each category which sounded really good to me. Then out of those, I had two criteria to narrow it down to a single menu. First, would all the dishes go well together without being redundant. Second, between all the dishes, will I be using a lot of carrots, beets, and apples? Because we have a lot of those laying around that need to be eaten.

So this is the menu I've come up with (it should be served in this order, but I'll consult my etiquette books):

Cold mint and apple tea

Wheat bread
White cheese with sage

Beetroot salad
Winter salad

Mossflower vegetable stew with dumplings

Hazelnut pudding
Apple pudding

I need to make up recipes for a few of them. That shouldn't be too hard. Off to the internet!

That's a huge meal... And of course, I could be making it for up to 13 people. Should I go even fancier and serve it as separate courses? Maybe I could kidnap some people to be servers. But then there's that awkward "I invited my friends to your family party" thing.

And then I should figure out in what order to make the food so it all gets done well. I'll make the cheese on Wednesday because I don't work that day. Can probably make the bread on Friday. I'll have to check the dessert recipes to see if they can be done in advance.