Winter Dinner Dates #3

For this weeks Saturday night Winter Dinner Date, we served a combination of tried & tested dishes. They were so good on previous occasions that I wanted to try them again with a few adjustments,  before moving on to the next set of new recipes I want to try out.
It was a cold & blustery day in Cape Town so we needed hearty food to warm us, & with 8 of us meeting up, we had to make sure there was plenty on the table.

The Menu

* Scallops with Chorizo

* Roast Chicken Pie served with baby carrots & peas

* White chocolate, fresh blueberries & Kahlua ice-cream

Ready to go!

This time when I prepared the scallops I removed the roe. That orangey bit around the edge does add flavour, but it definitely looks prettier without those wibbly bits. The only downfall is that it makes the scallop very small. We don't seem to be able to get larger scallops here, but I'll keep hunting for a good source, I enjoy them, even raw. But for a starter portion the small size is fine I guess.

The meat in our chicken pie has so much flavour from seasoning well & roasting it with lemon, lime, herbs & spices before adding to the other filling ingredients (leeks, mushroom & bacon) & sauce. Classic comfort food for a winters night.

Good white chocolate with vanilla seeds

Add blueberries

And a dash of Kahlua

Washi tape jam jars

Add a sparkler. Tah Dah!

I made sure I was a bit lighter with the Kahlua this week! Vanilla ice-cream topped with juicy blueberries, some crumbled white chocolate chunks, a drizzle of coffee liquor, and a sparkler!

The thing we've realised through hosting these dinners, is that we don't own a full set of anything. For our 1st party, we discovered the day before that we only had 4 forks?! We had about 12 knives, but just no forks. How does that happen?! Then last night, hosting for 8, there wasn't enough crockery - so my scallops were served on a Gruffalo plate, Warrens dessert was in a glass, and by the time it came to making a cup of tea we were down to using an old baby spoon! Maybe when I'm grown up I'll have a full set of everything, including proper wine glasses.

We don't really have table setting stuff either, but it's a bit easier to get around that. I used some of my favourite star fabric as a table cloth (as to be honest that was more as I hadn't gotten around to cleaning the red wine stains out of the normal white table cloth since our last dinner date - oops!) And for place mats I cut out big hearts from red paper. It actually looked really festive. A bit on the christmassy side, especially as we still have last years Christmas decorations hanging form the light fittings but that's ok - Xmas in July!
The dessert glasses are French jam jars that we collect, and they were decorated with washi tape to hide the screw top.
I added a Lottery ticket to the base of each paper place mat too hoping that it really would be like Christmas for someone, we waited in anticipation for the results, but they weren't published until after midnight. Still waiting to hear if there were any instant millionaires (if one of the guests suddenly 'disappears' on a long holiday in the next few weeks, then we'll know!!)

And the winning numbers were 8, 11, 25, 29, 40, 48 and bonus ball 28. Back to work on Monday for me then!

Such a wonderful night with fabulous friends. Stacks or laughter, Costa del Sol stories, plenty of innuendos around  the launch & success of our incredible friends' new book A Girl Walks in to a Bar -so proud of you Miss Paige, you're amazing.  And I think that thanks to everyones support & encouragement I'm ready to patent my invention, the Loud Inhailer App. Who needs to Lotto to get rich!


And the cars were still there & in one piece which is always a huge relief when people visit us in the hood!
Happy ending to a happy evening.
Happy <3
x