Monday, April 21, 2008

A saint in our midst. . . Archaeologists dig Annie's on-site gourmet cooking!
When all her children left home, Annie Evans of Myocum was sitting in bed one night contemplating her future, when husband Ian dropped a sheet of paper in her lap.

It was from the University of Glasgow and they were looking for a cook for an archaeological excavation in Cyprus.

"I didn't even know where Cyprus was," Annie said. I just knew that it was somewhere in the Mediterranean."


God bless her and all decent cooks who feed us our daily comestibles while in the field. If there's one thing project PIs need to pay some attention to, it's feeding the troops. Even lack of showers and flushies are secondary miseries compared to crappy food. Ya just can't dig or survey properly when your stomach is growling and you're NOT looking forward to the next meal. The two best cooks I ever had in the field were by former restaurateurs who cooked for excavations after retiring from the business. One was the famous San Juan Island field school -- thank you, Patty -- and another was the 1996 ARE field school at Memphis. The latter had a local Egyptian who did the cooking. Excellent stuff.