Come Dine With Me...

Some friends and I have committed to do a Come Dine With Me style series of dinner parties - without the sarcastic commentary and rifling through each other's knicker drawer.  The idea being that it's not that often you get the excuse to make a 3-course (or more) meal and we wanted to give 'proper entertaining' a go.  So, roughly once a month, we're going round to each other's home to, in the words of Lloyd Grossman before Masterchef's more aggressive resurrection, 'cogitate, deliberate and digest'.

I went first with an 'Italian feast', keeping true to the programme in that frequently the cooks on there try and be inspired by even the most tenuous link to a foreign heritage.  My grandad was Italian and in good Italian style, one of the main things he passed on was a love of Italian food and it's always inspirational to me.  Also we have one vegetarian in our party and rather than relegate her to a special menu of rabbit food like some Come Diners on the show (and having once been a vegetarian for about 9 years myself) I thought that for a truly enjoyable convivial meal what is is good for one should be good for us all.  And despite a love for carnivorous Italian delights like parma ham, salami or a meaty ragu, arguably what defines just as much classic Italian food is fantastic vegetables, herbs, breads and cheeses.

What I thought would be a simple menu actually turned into quite a time-consuming process, involving a couple of bread-type procedures as well as homemade pasta that not only required assembly of the dough but then a further fashioning into pretty little ravioli.  Despite preparations over 2 - 3 days I still found myself with an hour before my guests arrived, both myself and a sink full of utensils needing washing, mirroring the right-to-the-wire position of many Come Dine With Me contestants who I'd normally scoff at for their lack of preparation.  Somehow I managed to clean myself and the kitchen up and prepare the Campari and snacks before my first guest arrived promptly at 7pm...

The one good thing about going first is that I now have 3 more dinner parties to enjoy where I can just put my feet up, relax, and slag off their home decor... mwa ha ha.

Stella's Italian Feast

Campari cocktails and aperitivo: homemade tarallucci, polenta with gorgonzola and broccoli, olives and pecorino

Lemon and goats cheese ravioli

Melanzane parmagiana with green salad and homemade bread

Baked luccan fruit salad with mascarpone and amaretti

There wasn't much time for photos amongst the wine, strange Italian liqueurs, and chat, but here are a few....

Table - flowers, napkins, and even a water jug!

Tarallucci - first had these in Milan, little savoury biscuits with fennel, great with drinks!

Assembling the melanzane.... Anna Del Conte's is the best recipe EVER.

Melanzane parmigiana and polenta with broccoli and gorgonzola

Homemade sourdough bread

Lemon pasta - determined to be soggy, I managed to save it in the end....

Homemade lemon and goats cheese ravioli - after many hours faffing.

Cooking Price-Wise

Until I set eyes on this book I had no idea that legendary actor Vincent Price had also had his own cooking series during the 1970s.

In keeping perhaps with Price's horror persona, there are recipes for "Melon Monster" and "Cucumber Crocodile", and rather kitsch-sounding things like "Pineapple and Cheese loaf" and "Chicken Solange", whatever that is. But I mention this book not to make fun, but as a surprising and charming discovery about a famous actor who evidently didn't take himself too seriously and was genuinely interested in other cultures.

The blurb on the back invites the reader to "Travel round the world with Vincent Price - using your cooker instead of a jet plane". It's safe to say that Elizabeth David's mediterranean cookery discoveries of the 1950s took quite a while to trickle down to the plates and shops of Britain, but Price manages to encourage and educate readers to be more adventurous in a non-snobbish and accessible way: "You get the folks who think that foreign food is full of things that you can only get on special order from Harrods, and I must admit that the way some cookery books are written, you'd think that was so. So I was glad to accept the challenge when the producers of the series asked me to the shows. Their one condition was that all the ingredients in all the recipes must be readily available in just about any group of food shops or supermarket."

I think it's quite charming the way Price points out the limited nature of British tastes, at home and abroad. He notes that many people will eat spaghetti out of a tin but "the real thing, no matter how available it is, is quite beyond them"; he also reassures those "afraid of strange-sounding foods" that "basically the ingredients are the same, just put together in a different way." He also uses a 'Moroccan Tajine' recipe to gently poke fun at the silly prejudices of the British against international cultural practices: "The Moroccans, of course, eat their meals with their fingers...To those of you who think eating in this way is unhygienic, let me remind you that the Moroccans wash their hands very thoroughly before and after the meal, and that there are probably fewer germs on their fingers than are on the forks which come straight from a drawer, where they've been gathering dust, to the table and then to the mouth - you can imagine what sounds like to a Moroccan!"

Thursday late lunch

Having been off work for the Easter holidays, I've developed a bit of an eggs benedict habit (see last post).

I wanted to celebrate the last of my sister's hen's eggs that I had in my possession and was going to have it soft boiled with toast. Then I accidentally cracked the egg in its box so - what a shame! - poached it was. And I just 'happened' to have some leftover english muffins. No bacon/ham, but a fry-up of chorizo, tomatoes and mushrooms on the side. Crappy ceramic electric hob tried to conspire against me again (taking the saucepan off boiling once the egg's in and then finding I've put it on a burner that's been on already so it starts boiling again) but I rescued it.

The final result was, of course, sublime.