Being a person who loves to put together overly-elaborate parties, and being married to a person who loves the Tolkien-verse, I felt an instantaneous pull to make this happen in our house, at least once. I have a saying: If it's not practically impossible, I'm not even interested.
And in terms of difficulty, this party has it all. Research on the dietary habits of the shire. Research on the dietary habits of the British (apparently the inspiration for hobbit fare). The challenge of finding guests who will sit through such a thing. Developing a menu that includes seven meals plus dessert. (I share Ms. Accomando's conviction that the movie hobbits' seven meal schedule is superior to the book hobbits' six.) Cooking seven meals plus dessert. Eating seven meals plus dessert.
I decided that this level of effort and expense might be excusable if it were staged to celebrate Matt's birthday. After all, he's the real Tolkien fan. I just like to cook. This makes finding guests easier, too, since Matt's friends have already proven a willingness to travel and participate in grueling events - they all traveled for our wedding, and most made the hour-plus-long mountain hike that served as our processional, too.
And so the research began. I started with a study of hobbit eating patterns linked in the NPR article, and when I neared the end I learned the most amazing thing of all about hobbit food:
Almost all hobbit food seems to have been grown, raised, collected, brewed, processed, and baked in the Shire, a feat which inspired great pride and perhaps even a little smugness amongst the hobbits.
Hobbits. Are. Locavores.
So now, I have a grand opportunity to revive both this blog and some of our own locavorian eating habits (some of them have gone by the wayside in the last few years). I'll be planning a day-long, marathon get-together including seven meals and approximately a thousand hours of film, and I'm going to do it all locavore style.
Challenge. Accepted.
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