Roast Capsicum, Tomato and Cumin Soup

June 26, 2013 7:14 pm / 1 Comment /

A spicy, well balanced and tasty soup with a chilli kick!

Roast tomato, capsicum & cumin soup

Ingredients:

5 Red Capsicums
1Tbsp Olive oil
1 Onion chopped
2 cloves garlic crushed
1½ tsp cumin
2-3 long red chillies, seeds removed and finely chopped  (If you make it the day before the chilli will increase it’s heat level)
600g tin chopped tomatoes
3 cups Chicken Stock  or Vegetable Stock
To Serve:  3/4 cup thick Greek yoghurt mixed with 2 tsp honey and 1 tsp ground cumin

Method:

1.   Pre-heat Fan Grill to 200°C  Cut Capsicums in half and flatten with the palm of your hand, cutting the base if necessary.  Fan grill approx. 15 minutes until the skin is charred.  Place capsicums into a plastic bag for 5 minutes then peel retaining any juices.  Don’t do this under a tap it is messy but the flavour is better if you don’t wash away the juices.  Chop roughly.

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2.   Heat oil in large saucepan on low heat, cook onion about 5 minutes until soft.  Add garlic, chilli and cumin and cook another 2 minutes being careful it doesn’t burn.

3.  Add tomatoes, capsicums and stock.  Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer 15 minutes.  Cool and puree.

I also put it through a sieve as the chilli skin wasn’t completely pureed.  This is optional.

As noted above the chilli was definitely more prominent the next day and I added about 2 tsp sugar to cut that back a little.  If you don’t want it too spicy then use 2 and cook on the same day.  Don’t use the smaller, hotter chillies for this recipe.

Serve with a spoonful of spiced yoghurt.  Serve so guests can add more if they desire.

(Recipe adapted from Miele)

Posted in: Entrees, Soups, Vegetarian

Chicken Stock

June 26, 2013 7:09 pm / 2 Comments /

Yes you can buy Gluten free chicken stock but the best selling brand on the shelf is NOT Gluten free so it’s better to just make your own.

Ingredients:

2kg Chicken carcasses + 2 large chicken wings (Use more wings if you want a stronger chicken flavour, up to about 500g)
1 onion chopped
1 carrot chopped
2 sticks celery chopped
2 Bay Leaves
A few peppercorns and Parsley stalks

Method:

  1. Cover with cold water in a large stock pot.  Bring to boil skimming occasionally.
  2. Simmer with lid ajar for about 4 hours.
  3. Strain and refrigerate overnight.

Next day remove the fat as you can see in the pic below.  This quantity made enough for the whole Gluten Free Winter Dinner menu with about 2 cups remaining.  Freeze any extra within a couple of days.

 

Chicken stock

Posted in: Chicken, Stocks & Sauces

Buttermilk panna cotta & quinces

June 26, 2013 6:50 pm / 4 Comments /

Buttermilk panna cotta with quinces

Buttermilk Panna cotta – Lighter and not as sweet as your traditional Panna cotta.

Ingredients:

50g Castor Sugar
200ml cream
1 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped out
3 leaves Gelatine
500ml Buttermilk

Method:

  1. Heat sugar with half the cream  and the vanilla bean and stir well.  Bring almost to the boil and remove from heat.  Cut Vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape out the seeds.  Put the seeds back into the hot cream and cover the saucepan with a lid to infuse for at least 10 minutes.
  2. While you are waiting for that fill a large bowl full of cold water and soak the gelatine leaves.  They will go soft and invisible and only need to be squeezed out in your hand after about 5 minutes.  Add them to the warm cream/vanilla mixture, remove the vanilla pod and stir well to dissolve into the mixture.
  3. Add the rest of the cream then the buttermilk and pour into 8 x 1/2 cup moulds that have been lightly brushed with a vegetable oil or lightly sprayed with a cooking spray.

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Set aside in the refrigerator to set.  These can be made the day before.

To serve fill a small bowl with hot tap water and emerge them into the warm water carefully not allowing any to get over the top.  Shake them well and they should easily turn out onto your serving plate.

 

Slow baked Quinces with Verjuice

Ingredients:

3 Large Quince (early Winter is the best time of year for availability)
1/2 cup Verjuice
1/2 cup water
1 Lemon, juiced
3 tbsp. Sugar
1 tbsp. butter

Method:

1.   Fill a large bowl with cold water and add the juice of the lemon.

2.   Cut quinces into quarters and if large, cut again into eighths.  Remove all the pips and cores as these are tough and unpleasant to eat.  Be careful, they are very hard to cut and core.  There is no need to peel them.  Place them into the water as you work, the lemon will stop them turning brown.

3.   Drain completely.

4.   Lay into a flat dish in one layer, sprinkle with sugar, water and verjuice.  Toss to mix with your hands.

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5.   Add small knobs of butter.

6.   Cover tightly with foil and bake at 130°C for 5 hours.

They now should be a dark rosy colour and the sugar slightly caramelised.  Test about half way through, sometimes when I decide to add some lemon juice they actually need a bit more sugar.  You can also add a cinnamon stick, some lemon peel and more water if you would like more syrup 🙂

Delicious served warm or at room temperature with Ice Cream or Custard.  They went very well with the Panna cotta which are not super rich or sweet.

A great thing to have baking in the oven whilst you are slow cooking some meat!

Gluten free Almond Tuiles

Ingredients:

1¼ cups Almond Meal
small pinch salt
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
113g Unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup castor sugar – this is a reduced amount of sugar to the original recipe but they were still pretty sweet
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla

Method:

  1. Beat softened butter with castor sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy.
  2. Add egg beating well.
  3. Preheat oven to 130°C Fan Forced
  4. Mix in almond meal, baking powder and salt to form a soft but sticky mixture.
  5. Form into balls the size of a walnut.
  6. Cover baking tray with baking paper.  Put mixture onto paper and with the back of a warm teaspoon squash them into cookie size circles leaving lots of space for spreading. I did about 6 at a time.
  7. Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown.  They must be golden all over otherwise the centre won’t be cooked and will stick.  Keep and eye on them in the oven from time to time so they don’t over cook.  It is tricky, you have to get them at just the right time.
  8. Remove from oven and let them sit for a while on the tray until you can feel they firm up and can be lifted.  They should still be pliable enough to mould onto a rolling pin or bottle as you can see in the pic here.

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Let them cool completely and store carefully in an air tight container.

Posted in: Desserts

Hainanese Chicken in the Steam Oven

June 25, 2013 8:30 pm / 4 Comments /

After seeing this on SBS I desperately wanted to cook it and eat it! We had eaten it years ago but had forgotten exactly what it was like.  So went to the local Singaporean restaurant just to try it again and it lived up to all our expectations.  That combination of the steamed, succulent chicken breast with the chicken rice, chilli sauce, garlic and ginger sauce and sweet soy took us back to that little Singaporean hole-in-the-wall where we enjoyed it the first time.

Hainanese chicken in the steam oven

I wanted to cook it but I didn’t want to use a whole pot full of chicken stock.  Even though you could use the stock again in something else it’s just too much messing around, too many pots and too much washing up.  It is also too fussy with having to put the chicken into the stock, then bringing back to the boil and having to be on call in the kitchen.  So I have converted Tiffany’s recipe to use in the Steam Oven.  It was so much easier!

Take all your ingredients from the SBS Recipe  and make the Chilli Sauce (I used only 4 large chillies which were plenty)

Now make the Ginger and Garlic sauce, the mixture for inside the chicken and the soy, salt and sesame oil for rubbing once its cooked.

I also adjusted the Chicken Rice quantity down to 1½ cups Long Grain Rice, with 2 cups of Chicken Stock and the same quantity of ginger, garlic and pandan leaves.  Remember if you are altering the quantity the general guide is ‘quantity of rice to liquid plus 1/2 cup’.

The chicken I used was 1.2kg Lilydale which I removed from the fridge for about 1/2 hour before I started so it would come to room temperature.

Stuff the ginger, garlic and shallot mixture in the cavity of the chicken.  Now add the Chinese Wine and 1/2 the soy.

Place breast side down into the solid tray with 1 cup chicken stock, about 4 slices of ginger and 1 large shallot (or spring onion) cut roughly.

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Place into the Steam Oven @ 95° for 40 minutes.

Remove, drain from stock and place onto a plate.  Rub with the mixture of Soy, Seseme Oil and Salt that is in the recipe and leave to rest uncovered.  This chicken is served more at room temperature rather than piping hot.

Now put your Chicken Rice into the Steamer as described in the recipe with the cooked ginger and garlic mix and the pandan leaves @ 100° for 17 minutes.  Remove the pandan leaves and fluff up.  Don’t add anymore salt to the rice, the salt level was adequate from the stock.

Serve with all the sauces and your Chicken Rice.

Absolutely fantastic – the chicken and the rice were perfectly cooked!  You can see how tender the chicken is in this photo.  You will never boil a huge pot of stock again….

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This is an adapted recipe from SBS Food, Created by Tiffany Wong

This dish is traditionally served with just the chicken breast so the remainder of the chicken will be turned into something else.  Only Serves 2 like this so if you wanted to cook another chicken at the same time then double your mixture for the cavity to Serve 4.  You can bone and slice the other parts of the chicken if you wish.  They will still be tender and juicy.  Actually some restaurants will serve you the thigh fillet, I guess it depends on how many they have pre-cooked ready to serve.

 

Posted in: Chicken, Main Courses, Rice, Steam Oven

Winter Roast Pork with Roasted Apples & Garlic

June 23, 2013 7:37 pm / 6 Comments /

The other night in the local pub we were lucky enough to win the Meat Tray!  So now it’s a great time of year to do something with the little roasts that we won (and stuck in the freezer last week).  So being a Sunday night it’s family feast time when my kids come over to eat some of mum’s home cooked food or be guinea pigs on a recipe that I’ve been testing.  They don’t mind, you know living away from home in your 20’s you’re really not cooking much for yourself with the array of wonderful and cheap restaurants we have here in Sydney.

So I am going to use the Combi Steamer (of course!) but I want to trick the program so I can get my vegetables to cook at the same time….

The only way that we can test this out is to use it, and adjust it next time if necessary.  There isn’t much I don’t know about different functions on ovens and there is always a way that you can ‘fix’ it as I use to say.

Most brands have Auto programs for Roasting.   If you have a Probe, use it!  If you don’t then follow my method below, calculate the cooking time based on the weight of the meat.

Roast pork with apples & garlic

So I have a small 1.2kg piece of rolled Pork Scotch Fillet with a little crackling on the top.  This should take about an hour in total but I was going to test the Auto Program, Roast, Pork with Crackling.  When I put the meat in and turned it to this program the time appeared at 3h 25min.  That was far too long for my little roast!  My model doesn’t have the probe which I think would be fantastic as that will give you the correct internal temperature depending on how you prefer your meat to be cooked.  The time would then be adjusted accordingly so there is no concern about times initially appearing like this.  The core temperature of roast pork should be somewhere in the vicinity of 65-80° so because I can’t tell that precisely I am going to have to use the old fashioned method of time and feel.  The weird bit about the Auto programs is that it doesn’t know how large your piece of meat actually is so how does it know when it’s cooked?  I have asked the Home Economists who work for Miele and they tell me that there is a Sensor built into the appliance. On the Auto Program there is the ability to make the program a little longer or shorter next time you use it but it’s all about using this appliance to it’s full capacity so I will do a manual Combination Combi Steam program this time and try the Auto Roast next time when I have 3+ hours and a larger piece of meat.

Make notes at home when you cook something like this, giving the weight of the meat and a note about how it came out.  This is a great way to build a reference for yourself.

Roasting time in a traditional oven for Pork is 160-180°, allowing 25-30 minutes per 500g plus 25-30 minutes extra overall.  Plus resting time which should be at least 15 minutes, covered. 

Remember I said that I am going to try to trick this program so that I don’t have to use my other oven for the vegetables.  As I am also roasting apples with the pork I am going to have a large amount of moisture.  This may be a problem but this is the method I am going to use:

1.      In the Solid Tray toss your vegetables, quartered apples, baby onions and whole garlic cloves in a little olive oil.  Sprinkle with a little sea salt and put into the oven, on the lowest shelf, without the meat @ 180° for 20 minutes.  This is going to kick start them.

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2.     Whilst this first stage is cooking, score the rind of the pork with a sharp knife and rub in a little salt.  When the first stage has finished, put the pork directly onto the wire rack and place over the top of the vegetables that are already on the bottom shelf.  This will then allow the vegetables to roast in all that delicious pork fat 🙂

3.    Turn the oven from it’s previous temperature to Combination Mode and set 2 Stages of cooking.  The first one – 200° + 30% moisture for 20 minutes then Stage 2, 180° + 50% moisture for 40 minutes.

Combination program as you set it above will use a combination of heat and steam (that’s why the Combi Steamer is SO good for roasting meat as (like bread, see my article in the Bread Category) because that’s the environment you need for perfectly roast and succulent meat!

Conclusion:       Vegetables were perfectly cooked like this, the roasted Apples and Garlic made the meal, Meat was juicy and succulent, Crackling was fabulous!

Delicious served with perfectly cooked Asparagus from the Steam Oven. Cook for 2 minutes on 100% steam.

and a great bottle of Cape Mentelle, Cabinet Merlot from the Margaret River 🙂

 

Posted in: Combi Steamer, Main Courses

Quince & Golden Syrup Steamed Pudding

June 22, 2013 8:54 pm / Leave a Comment /

Years ago another family favourite was this old recipe for Golden Syrup Steamed Pudding.  The addition of orange rind and juice makes it special but now with quince it’s even better!

I used some quince left over from my previous recipe “Baked Quinces in Verjuice“.  You do need some already cooked for this recipe, if you haven’t got any then cook some in the Steam Oven earlier or the day before.  Remember quinces cooked for a shorter time don’t have quite the depth of colour as the long slow cooked version but because they are cooked again in the pudding the result will still be fabulous.

This is the first time I have done one giant pudding, usually I do small individual ones.  The timing on individual ones would be about 20-30 minutes. Check after 20 minutes as it depends on the size of the dishes.

Quince & golden syrup steamed pudding

1 pudding basin, about 6 cup size

Ingredients:

½ cup Golden Syrup
About ½ cooked quince, cut into thin slices
125g butter, softened
1/2 cup castor sugar
grated rind 1 orange
2 eggs
1½ cups Self Raising Flour
1/3 cup fresh orange juice
¼ cup milk
½ cup extra finely diced cooked quince

Method:

  1. Grease pudding basin well.  Add Golden Syrup.  Slice quince thinly and fan around the base on top of the Golden Syrup.  Overlap the slices slightly so you will get a lovely pattern on the top when it’s turned out.
  2. Cream butter, sugar and orange rind.  Add eggs one at a time and beat well.
  3. Mix in sifted flour then orange juice and milk.
  4. Fold through diced, cooked quince and pour into prepared pudding basin.
  5. Cover with two layers of baking paper (or a lid if you have one) and secure well.

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6.     Steam on level 1 on the ordinary rack at 100°C for 90 minutes.
7.     Let it rest for at least 5 minutes.
8.     Turn out onto a large plate and serve with lots of cream or ice cream…. Yum 🙂

Now you have a Steam Oven you can cook this easily without the pot on the stove and messing around with all the boiling water, keeping an eye on it, topping it up and washing up afterwards!  Remember you have 90 minutes in the water chamber before it will ask you for more water so you can easily get on and do something else whilst it’s cooking.

*    If you don’t have a steam oven then bring a large pot of water to the boil with enough water so it comes half-way up the side of the pudding basin.

Lower the pudding in and reduce to a simmer.  Cook for 1½ hours making sure the water is topped up to it’s original level.

 

 

Posted in: Desserts, Steam Oven

French Sweet Short Pastry

June 21, 2013 1:41 pm / Leave a Comment /

Before children I lived in Melbourne and the first French cooking classes I attended were at the home of a lady in the Northern suburbs somewhere. She called herself ‘La Parisienne School of French Cooking’ but after a quick look on the internet I would say she has nothing to do with the current business in Carlton in Melbourne.

Unfortunately I can’t remember her name, and it’s not written on any of her recipes that I still use, but I recall she had trained at Cordon Bleu in Paris and had then moved back to live with her mum.  It was the 1980’s and people had just started getting into food.  The house was your average 1950’s suburban brick veneer, with original kitchen and I remember sitting in the bench seat in the kitchen whilst she taught us all the classic French methods of cooking (with her mum as her attentive assistant).

I gathered she had lived overseas for quite sometime and cooked for Prince Charles, along many other important people whose names I can’t remember.  She was I would say in her early 30’s then, loved cooking traditional French food and was an excellent teacher as she opened my eyes to how it all tasted so much better if it was done ‘properly’.  Browning the bones for brown stock, not browning the bones for white stock, the most fiddley and accurate chopping and garnishes.  It all made it so much better.  To be honest she was probably the reason that I decided to do formal cooking qualifications.  It wasn’t until I got to the soups, stocks & sauces module at TAFE that it all came back to me.  I wanted to be able to cook like that too.

There were several ‘courses’ but the ones I loved the most were the French Patisserie, Desserts and Gateau’s.  Perhaps because they were the most complicated!  It was also from these classes that I developed the love of ‘kitchen gadgets’ and purchased all sorts of French rings and things for baking her tarts.  I will do a section on these later.  In the meantime this is her recipe for Short Pastry, or as the French call it Pâté Sucré:

Makes 300g dough which is enough for a 26cm tart.  This is the perfect French pastry for a tart which gives you that really short, melt in the mouth pastry.

Ingredients:

90g Butter
30g or 2 tablespoons castor sugar or 3 tbsp. icing sugar
¼ tsp vanilla sugar
Scant 125g Plain Flour
30g (3 tbsp. ground almonds)
½ beaten egg

Method:

Using a food processor is so much easier for making pastry.  If you don’t have one you will have to rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips then fold through the other dry ingredients, then the egg and work into a dough.  I have always had a Magimix because it has the stronger, French motor.  Originally I had a small one which I gave my mother before I invested in this larger model.  It must be 20 years old now and is still going strong.

  1. If you have a processor cut the butter into small pieces and put everything into the bowl except the egg.
  2. Process until it looks like breadcrumbs.
  3. Finally add the half egg (sometimes you may need a teaspoon of chilled water with this as it depends on how fresh the almonds are).  It should be a soft, not sticky dough.
  4. Don’t over mix this dough.  As soon as it comes together take it out of the processor, pat it into a flat disc and wrap in Glad Wrap.

The original recipe said to rest for 24 hours!  That’s not going to happen these days but you must let it rest for at least 2-3 hours.

Apologies for not remembering your name, if you happen to come across this recipe one day I would love to hear from you!

 

 

 

Posted in: Baking

Red Thai Curry

June 20, 2013 7:55 pm / 2 Comments /

No need to wash all those pans, now you can cook a delicious Thai Curry in your Steam Oven with the rice and vegetables at the same time!  Well you do end up with 3 steamer trays to wash but they really only need a rinse out in hot soapy water.

Sometimes I try to make my red Thai paste but that is more time consuming.  This is a quick mid-week version.  Traditionally Thai people put pineapple and cherry tomatoes in this dish and that is fantastic, particularly with duck but for mid-week I often cook this with whatever I have in the fridge at the time.  Tonight is kumara and green beans but if you can manage to get some Thai basil it certainly makes the dish so much better.  I didn’t have any tonight, the garnish is Vietnamese mint just for colour.

Red Thai curry

Serves 4-6

Ingredients:

1½ cups jasmine rice, washed
2 cups water
600g chicken thigh fillet, trimmed of any fat and cubed
3 generous tablespoons of Thai Red Curry Paste (I used 1/2 x 195g jar of Ayam Red Curry Paste) OR to taste
2 tablespoons of palm sugar, grated
1 tsp of fish sauce
4 very finely sliced kaffir lime leaves with the stems removed
140ml can coconut cream
1 medium size kumara thinly sliced then cut into bite size pieces
handful of green beans, trimmed
few cherry tomatoes cut in half
Fresh Thai basil or coriander to serve

Method:

  1. Mix the Red Thai Paste, sugar and fish sauce into chicken and let it marinate for a few minutes while you put on the rice and kumara.
  2. Place rice and water into a solid stainless steel tray on the bottom level of the steamer,  at the same time peel and cut kumara and place in the small perforated tray on the top level.  Steam both uncovered 100°C for 6 minutes.
  3. Remove kumara and set aside.
  4. Now add the chicken to the middle level and cook uncovered for 8 more minutes 100°C.  Leave the rice, it will continue to cook.
  5. Remove the chicken and stir in the coconut cream.  It will be quite runny.  If you like you could thicken it with 1tsp cornflour mixed with 1tablespoon of water and mix in well before it goes back into the steamer.
  6. Add the beans on top of the cooked kumara and put it back into the top level.  You now have the rice on the bottom, the chicken in the middle and the vegetables on the top.  Cook for another 2 minutes at the same 100% power.
  7. Stir in vegetables and thai basil or coriander and serve with the fluffed steamed rice.

 

Posted in: Main Courses, Steam Oven, Thai

Old fashioned Egg, Bacon and Tomato Pie

June 18, 2013 5:43 pm / Leave a Comment /

I nearly didn’t put this on as I thought it would be too boring.  But then I thought, my grown up children love it and if we don’t add recipes such as this to blogs then how will young up and coming foodies know how to cook it?  So easy the little kids can make this one and it may also become your family favourite.

This is the perfect Sunday night family dinner, served with a bowl of hot soup.

Excellent with Tomato Sauce (especially a home made one), or a favourite chutney and a tossed salad 🙂
Egg, bacon & tomato pie

Ingredients:

1 x 375g packet frozen Puff Pastry
2 large onions, cut in half and thinly sliced
4 large Bacon rashes, chopped
2 ripe tomatoes, thickly sliced
Handful of baby spinach
6-8 eggs
Salt & pepper and a little fresh parsley

Method:

  1. Sauté the onions and bacon in a frying pan, with a lid, on a low heat until soft.  Increase the heat a little, remove the lid and let them start to caramelise and get some colour.  Turn off the heat and let them cool in the pan.
  2. Preheat your oven to 160°C Fan Forced.
  3. Cut the block of pastry into one third for the top and 2/3rds for the base.  Spray a large 26-28cm pie dish with an oil spray or grease well.
  4. Roll out the base first making sure you don’t have any breaks or holes in it and lay into pie dish.  Press around the edges well. Add the cooled onion and bacon.
  5. Now cut the tomatoes into thick slices and lay them over the bacon and onion mix.  Season well with salt and pepper.
  6. Top with the baby spinach and eggs that should be carefully broken straight onto the spinach layer.  Place them evenly around so that each slice should receive a bit of everything.
  7. Salt and pepper the eggs, top with a few bits of torn up parsley.
  8. Roll out the remaining pastry you have left for the top.  Brush the edges of the base with milk and now layer the top over the bottom, pressing down well to seal.
    Brush the whole thing well with milk, add a few steam holes and bake for about 45 min until puffed and golden brown.
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Yum – comfort food at it’s best!

Posted in: Main Courses

Gluten Free Winter Dinner Party

June 16, 2013 7:12 pm / 2 Comments /

Well my first dinner party since I started this site just happened to be a Gluten Free event.  To be honest it’s not that difficult – just think fresh food and as long as you make everything yourself then you know exactly what is going in it.  I will list the menu then recipes to follow but not in any particular order.

Nuts and Olives to start

Entrée – Roasted Capsicum, tomato and cumin soup

Main Course – Osso Buco with Stephanie’s Gremolata, soft polenta and green beans

Assorted Cheese and Fruit

Dessert – Buttermilk Panna cotta, Slow baked Quinces in Verjuice and Almond Tuile

I have now done separate categories for each of these recipes so hopefully they will be easier to find.

We all had a great evening, the food and wines worked well together as did the mix of guests.  All the feedback was that the menu was ideal for a Winter dinner party and was enjoyed by all.

Thank you everyone for making it a special night 🙂

 

 

Posted in: Dinner parties