In attendance: Lucy, Dave & Ben (obvs) / Rob, Sandy and Tilly / Greg, Amanda, Cerys and Harry / Us / Claire, Dan and Gracie.
What we ate:
Thursday: We turned up a day early, and were treated - treated I tell you - to an experimental curry. It was Black-Eyed bean curry from Anjum Anand's new book, and whilst Dave didn't look like he wanted to cook it at the time, it was actually v tasty - recipe please Lucy!
Friday: With most people in place, Lucy knocked up a lovely, summery roast butternut squash and feta salad for six, as you do. Well, five as Dave doesn't like butternut squash... This was followed with more salad for dinner, in this case Oliver Rowe's chicken, tomato, tarragon, bacon and sourdough salad, with Bill Granger's salt-roasted new potatoes. With Dave on bacon duties, and Greg on chicken-pulling-apart-duties, and Rob on being an anaemic, whining veggie tosser duties, it's a triumph!
Whilst highly tasty, and with the added health twist of the addition of pumpkin and pine nut seeds, it's not the best base for six hours of getting hammered on red wine, champers and dancing to The Stone Roses.
Casualties: Rob had to be taken to bed - vegetarians, tsk!
Saturday: Ohhh, it's scorchio! For lunch we take advantage of Lucy's bulk buying of the local fayre (not Pork Scratchings, the other stuff) and have pasta with Worcestershire asparagus and poached egg, along with a selection of meats and cheeses:
We don't have pancetta (to appease that Nazi Rob), but more interestingly I experiment with poaching and then immersing the eggs in iced water until I'd cooked them all. Oddly it works a treat, they're all perfectly runny and I felt just a little bit like a proper chef.
After a soggy, storm battered egg hunt we get we get a take out from the Thai Emerald for dinner.
Casualties: Pretty much everybody
Sunday: Everybody's off today, although we decide to hang around for another night. I manage to have two lunches, Dave's antagonistic sandwiches AND Lucy's antagonistic feta salad - hurrah! Even better, for dinner Dave cranks up the barbie with an amazing marinated chicken.
Casualties: Nobody, although I think we're all feeling a little brackish. Next stop, Greg's birthday BBQ
Wow! Not only do we all have children now, but even the food is more grown-up! Sounds bloody delicious and I love that you had a proper chef moment whilst poaching eggs, thats still something I haven't quite mastered. There has however been a lot of talk on the radio this week about how rotten the supermarket eggs they sell us are, which of course explains my poaching problems! Glad it was such a fun weekend, its been great seeing the photos, hard to imaging ourselves there having not even seen Davis and Lucy's country mansion.... one day!
ReplyDeleteBest. Post. Ever. And not just because it has filled in some significant gaps in my memory. I found 3 small foil wrapped eggs in the garden today by the way...bit soggy but nice nonetheless.
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