So if strangers are just friends you haven’t yet met, last night I had 4 friends round for dinner but in this case they were friends who paid for the privilege.
As part of the Brighton & Hove Food Festival and in the style of a secret supper club or the far less cool guilty pleasure Come Dine With Me, keen cooks were invited to open their doors to the town’s foodies and cook for them, or in my case as the woman behind it is an old friend I was just pretty much told I was doing it, so I posted my menu online & people booked,so far so good, no problem. No problem at least as far as the cooking was concerned, I’m confident when it comes to my food & am happy to meet & entertain new people but having strangers in my house is another issue entirely. I share a smallish 1 bedroom flat with the boyfriend, 2 cats about 3000 records, several thousand cds & books plus my robot collection and other assorted junk. We love our house but it’s not designed for formal entertaining (it’s not designed at all really, it just kinda evolved) plus we’re not exactly clean freaks and the thought of random strangers coming to eat & being horrified by the chaos & low(ish) level of filth gave me the fear, on top of which a couple of weeks ago my friend who’s organised the whole thing announced that the local paper was doing a piece on it & she’d arranged for a photographer to come & take pics of me cooking to accompany the article hence followed two weeks of frantic cleaning and the kitchen is now sparkly, the hallway clear of dustballs & the sofa & carpet free of the usual covering of cat hair.
By yesterday afternoon I was fairly confident that no one would be too horrified at the prospect of eating here, I had a mild panic that I didn’t have enough matching wine glasses but as none of my crockery matches either I decided it would have to just be part of the whole shabby chic affair after all the food’s the important stuff. The menu was:- Salad of figs,lambs lettuce, air dried ham & young goats cheese with a balsamic reduction/ panfried monkfish fillet with butternut squash & aubergine risotto with parmesan crisps, deep fried sage & parsley oil/ a white chocolate & chili blondie & a chocolate brownie with homemade vanilla ice cream.
My guests ( 3 women, Kirsten, Jean & Amanda + 1 man, Andy) arrived at 7.30 and we started off getting to know each other over a bottle of Viognier which I already had on the go before moving onto Cava brought by Jean and the conversation was flowing with the booze so I figured we should start eating before everyone got too comfortable so I got everyone seated at my rather too small table at which point I discovered that Kirsten doesn’t eat meat, a fact the event organiser had neglected to share with me but thankfully she wasn’t too precious about it as I’d prepared the salads in advance and the only option was to pick out the ham from hers, Delicious Italian wine was provided by Ten Green Bottles who supply wine to such culinary luminaries as The Fat Duck, The River Cafe & Daphne’s, Cantina del Taburno Falanghina for the first course & Baron di Pauli Enosi with the main ( http://www.tengreenbottles.com/ ), first course done I had to quickly deal with the monkfish, the risotto was oven baked & ready to go as were the other accompaniments so it was just a case of quickly pan frying it & then finishing it in the oven for 5 minutes. Plating up was precarious as my kitchen is so tiny & crammed with stuff there’s barely any work surface but I’m an expert at balancing plates on the dish drainer, stools etc so the main was served without event and even seconds of risotto and so to pudding, the ice cream was so well received I couldn’t resist offering a bonus dessert as I recently made chocolate ice cream with white chocolate chips, an accompanying wine would have been nice but we made do with Amanda’s fine bottle of red before moving onto the sofa & coffee & biscotti before calling it a night around 1ish.
Well I thoroughly enjoyed the evening and I hope my guests/new friends did too and now I have a clean house I’m thinking I might try & keep it that way & do another night before the festival finishes without stressing about what people might think of our homely little pigsty. Now what’s left to eat tonight?
What I had for dinner 