Dinner Party with Martha and Phillipe
Saturday night… Dinner Party. First proper one in ages - Martha came over with her French chap Phillipe. Lovely to have the opportunity to cook again. I tried not to get too bogged down in accompaniments - in the past I have spent days cooking just because I wanted to make every side-dish as special (read: complex) as the main course.
We started off drinking sherbet (cheap, sweet sparkling plonk mixed with freshly-squeezed lime juice - gorgeous). Gill made the starter - a salad of smoked salmon, lettuce, tomatoes, mozzarella, black olives & artichoke hearts. The main course came from The Vegetarian Bistro - Aubergine and Fennel with Tomatoes topped with Cheese Custard. It was a gratin dish - layers of fennel, onion & tomato sauce alternated with aubergine, and topped off with a mixture of mozzarella, parmesan and egg that rose and crisped souffle-like. Along with this I served potato mashed up with the left over creme fraiche, and spring cabbage blanched and sauted in walnut oil.
For dessert we had a Nigella dessert special (she really is good at these - turning me into a domestic goddess already). Dried apricots, soaked & cooked in a cardamom-y syrup, split and stuffed with creme fraiche and then dusted with ground pistachio. Very middle-eastern tasting, sweet & scrummy.
’twas nice to do things properly - of course, might have been nicer to go even more over the top (I have some dessert wine somewhere that would have been a treat with those apricots, and an after-dinner cigar wouldn’t have gone amiss). But by the end of the evening, we felt well & truly stuffed & sated. Chatted for a while and then went to bed and… slipped into unconsciousness while half-way through massaging Gill’s shoulders.