Cooking people (Antti)

Dragonbane Diary
Wednesday, June 7th, 2006
Älvdalen, Sweden

Cooking people ... I mean, cooking for people.

Hello again, the building camp of this summer has started and it's progressing on schedule. I haven't been able to write much from here since I've been quite busy with my job as the local chef, but at least the food has been good and plentiful, so the builders are in good hands here.

Our day begins at eight (well, closer to the nine actually but don't tell anyone) in the morning with a breakfast of oatmeal porridge, tea, coffee and bread. Then the building team leaves for the building site and I'm left at the school with a single helper. First job of the day is washing the dishes, they pile in quite fast here, I hope we get our dishwasher machine repaired quickly.

The making of the mid day meal begins usually at eleven, it takes supricingly long time to make food for a big group of people, one hour is an absolute minimum for something very simple like pasta with bolognese sauce. After I finish the food I'll load it to a car with my assistant and then it is driven to the game site where the hungry builders are eagerly waiting for it.

At 14:00 I usually take a short break, sometimes I use the time to move our computers as they are shown in our network plan, or put some Ethernet cables down. If there are no new computers to be connected I might take an inventory of our foodstuff and plan next weeks meals, and if I'm really lucky I might find enough time to sit in front of my Playstation console and relax a bit (not a very likely occasion).

The cooking of the evening meal starts somewhere around 16:00, I usually make some more complex dishes for the evening, since they are not in such a hurry as the midday meal that goes to the building site. I have tried to balance the meals in such a way that there would be lot of protein in midday so that the builders have the energy to work and lot of carbohydrates at the evening so that everyone would have an easy time sleeping.

The building crew returns at 20:00 and sometimes I have managed to get the dinner to be done by then, on other times I tell everyone to go to the sauna first, and the food will be ready when I arrive to the sauna.

After the sauna it's time to read the last e-mails and then go to sleep. Usually everyone has used up all their energy so there isn't much of evening activity. At midnight the whole school will rumble from the peaceful sound of snoring men who'll sleep until the next day of hard work at the Dragonbane building camp.

So, if you are coming to build the Cinderhill village, you can be sure that you are in good hands, which reminds me of an incident that happened to me but I'll leave that to a next time.

Antti Oksanen