If you hadn't already seen it, argentlion and elizabethnmafia will be our next B&B - which is cool, now I have more time to play with food! And they'll do a fabulous job, of that I have no doubt. So congrats, Ros and Gaston!!!!

So meanwhile, I have some really nifty projects I'm working on for Pentathlon - the hard part at the moment is resisting the urge to go play on the Davis Library catalog instead of working. See, if I did that, I could have all the books I want to look at picked out and organized before I get there...

So what are these fabulous projects, you ask? (or maybe you don't, but I'm going to tell you anyway).

1. I'm working on a translation of a cookbook I found. I'm *really* hoping no one else is already working on this one - last time I found a cookbook I thought wasn't translated, I didn't even start working on the translation before I found someone else had already done it. (And I'm not sure there's value in doing it just for the sake of doing it - it's not like I'm a language guru who's going to find subtle point the other translator missed, I'm doing this more to get information that isn't available, out there.)

2. I'm going to cook something from said translation - haven't decided what yet. There are lots of tasty-sounding things, though, so yeah.

3. Last year I displayed several different *types* of sauces. This year, I think I'm going to try something a little different, and display several versions of the same sauce, as specified in different cookbooks. My thought is cameline sauce, but I haven't decided, for sure, that that's what I'll do.

4. I'm calligraphing a cookbook - one specifically devoted to sauces. Not sure that this is going to get bound, or not - we'll see; but I have ink I made and I'm going to make red ink for the capitals and lines betwen the recipes, which was done in some of the existant ones - and will look cool!

5. The project that in some ways is niftiest, and yet I am most intimidated by? I'm going to attempt to make a horsehair sieve. Sieves were used for *everything* in a medieval kitchen, and horsehair ones were VERY common. (Which gets really funny, actually - I found a fabulous quote by a Catholic Inquisitor on the Cathar heretics, and their opinion of Communion and horse hair sieves...) I've found evidence of naalbinding, and evidence of weaving, but these fall well before and well after my target date, so more research is in order. My hunch though, is for weaving...