Yesterday it was my turn to have my friends round for dinner. We take it in turns to cook for each other, and it's a really nice excuse to try new recipes whilst also catching up all the gossip and drinking all of London's supply of fizzy wine.
To start, we had roquamole with vegetable sticks and tortilla chips. If you haven't tried roquamole yet, believe me when I say YOU NEED IT IN YOUR LIFE. It contains avocado, blue cheese, and sour cream. Could there be a better union of ingredients? I think not.
Look at the lovely colour of that dip. Isn't it beautiful? You can also see the first of many glasses of pink wine on the table there.
For the main course, I made Chicken Zorba. It's a dish my housemate Abi used to make at uni whenever we had people over, and it was always a success. I don't have the recipe, but I found it here. I doubled the quantities of marinade, because I was using standard supermarket chicken and I thought it needed a bit of a boost.
I like having dinners where you assemble your own food - that way, there's no pressure to eat something you don't like, and you can have as much or as little as you want. So, we had a basket of pittas, dishes of sliced peppers, cucumbers, and a big dish of chicken and another of hummus-yogurt sauce. It used all the dishes I own, but what else is a dishwasher for.
For pudding, we had something I spotted in the Guardian over the weekend and knew I had to try: blondies with macerated strawberries. I know, right?
It reads like a strange recipe (soaking the coconut in orange juice? adding cardamon?), and it was fiddly, but oh my gosh it was worth it. The variety of flavours actually worked very nicely and although the texture wasn't of a traditional brownie (more like a heavy sponge-cake), that meant they were fluffy and moreish. We ate the whole tray. Whilst drinking dessert wine.
After the meal, I believe there might have been some dancing around the kitchen to some classic Meatloaf tunes. The sign of a successful dinner party, I would say.
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