dinner...

I love the morning of the day after people come over for dinner. The house is lovely and clean and there are no horrible jobs left to do. I'm sitting here in my dressing gown drinking a cup of coffee with no plans other than to go shopping for a dishwasher. The sun is shining and all is well with the world.

We had a lovely evening last night. Unfortunately, Mr and Mrs Carrot Cake couldn't come after all because their kids were sick. It was nice seeing Mr Rock Cake and Ms Gypsy Tart again, because we seem to see so little of them. Mr and Mrs We-Don't-Have-Cake-Names-Yet were on good form. We all ate too much and drank too much and a jolly time was had by all.

The food was rather good, even if I do say so myself. We started with a leek and onion tart, which sounds a bit dull but is lovely. Using a decent cast iron, or some other kind of oven proof pan, the leeks and onions are gently sautéed in butter and olive oil with a sprinkling of thyme. They are then covered with a cheese pastry and the whole thing is then baked for about 20 minutes. The delicious crumbly texture of the pastry is complimented by the sweet caramelised leeks and onions. We had it with some very lightly dressed rocket and some caramelised peppers (which were rather nice. Sweet peppers with a hint of heat. I can't claim credit for these. I bought them from Waitrose). The main course was something that I have made a few times before: cod and smoked salmon with pesto wrapped in Parma Ham. It sounds a bit over-the-top but it just works together really well. We had that with some pea mash. The mash was dead easy to make and can be reheated, although I did have some doubts about that. I made it earlier in the afternoon for convienence but I did wonder if the delicate flavour of the peas would be destroyed by reheating. It wasn't. All you have to do is soften some spring onions with a knob of butter, add a couple of heads of Little Gem lettuce, some chopped mint and the peas, together with some white wine, and gently cook the lot for about ten minutes. Then add some cream and puree the lot. I drizzled some mint vinegarette over the whole lot.

Pudding was a Tunisan Orange Cake, which is basically a relatively straightforward sponge cake made with bread crumbs and ground almonds, and an inordinate amount of sunflower oil. The cake is then soaked in a citrus syrup. I served it with dollops of Greek yoghurt. This is one of my favourite puddings and I've made it lots of times. For some reason, yesterday I decided to have a look at the recipe and noticed that I had been cooking it wrong all this time. I had misread the recipe. I could never work out why my cake took so long to cook. I sort of decided that the temperature of our oven was a bit off. I've told you before that I just cook everthing at full blast while keeping an eye on it. Turns out that the recipe suggests baking the cake from a cold oven. I gave that a try and it turns out that the recipe timing is perfect. I really should pay more attention in future.

We moved on to the cheese course: ripe Gorgonzola and a beautiful chunk of Parmesan. And we finished off the meal with some freshly brewed coffee and Tartufo Dolce di Alba (bitter chocolate truffles from Alba).

Finally, mostly we drank Spanish Verdejo, Australian Shiraz, a delicious liqueur Muscat also from Australia, Italian Limoncello and Disaronno and some vintage port from Portugal. We are just so cosmopolitan. Oh, and Mr We-Don't-Have-Cake-Names-Yet had some cheap French brandy, which I only bought because I wanted to use it in a recipe. He said that it was okay, but I think he was probably being polite. After agreeing to drink it, he couldn't very well say it was crap. The labelling of the 3 years old brandy is fantastic. The brandy is actually described as a rare old French brandy. There must be a law against that sort of thing?

I didn't take any photographs of the food, but this is a picture of the table before our guests arrived. By the way the small silver thing hiding behind the candle in the foreground is an elephant bottle opener from Denmark. The lovely David TEFL Smiler gave it to us when he stayed with us a few months ago. Apparently it's modelled on the Carlsberg brewery's Elephant Gate in Copenhagen. It is very pretty, and useful, and now has pride of place on our table.