I play Dungeons and Dragons regularly with some friends on Monday nights. Its social, and a lot of fun. I have a strong interest in medieval cooking- about which I had talked endlessly to the other players, and on a dare, I hosted a dinner for our characters. My idea was to take some of the Medieval and Renaissance banqueting ideas I had been reading about- and play with them a bit to make a somewhat exotic banquet appropriate to our gaming setting, a renaissance world, with Babylonian and Roman overtones. (Next time I will have the black chickens to stuff with olives...) In our group- we had several very different cultures and cuisines to represent. We had elves- for whom I assumed a very light, Japanese type cuisine- with emphasis on quality and presentation. after all, if you live for thousnads of years you have the time to turn everything into art. We have several human characters, human culture in this case being based strongly on classical Greek and Roman models, as well as a mixture of Byzantine and Babylonian. We also has a dragon as a player character. Dragons in this world enjoy Oriental style cuisine, Japanese soups, vegetables and meat sautéed and served over rice, but they also enjoy consuming precious metals (How DO you keep the guests from nibbling on the flatware...), and they like to eat charcoal for enjoyment, like popcorn. One of our characters was a thief from Sicily, so I was unable to resist making the Sicilian celebration cake. One of my hardest challenges was finding Native American foods for our Woodland Indian character, and in the end I baked squash,and included the wild mushroom dish for him.