There are four of us in my immediate team and each of us has invited the others around for a meal. It was my turn to host last. We are all crazy busy people and finding a free Saturday that suited everyone plus partners was a challenge. This has been in the diary for… three months? to make sure we could all do it.

I haven’t cooked a dinner for ages, which is a shame as I do enjoy it. My house is truly awful since the pandemic and was completely off the cards, so T hosted in his amazing home. (He has literally written a book on interior design and practices what he preaches.)

The menu started with smoked mackerel pâté – very close to this BBC Good Food recipe.

Pudding – well I wanted to do things quite similar to my CDWM menu, so was planning on making the strawberry jelly, apple tart and chocolate mousse I did back then. After a bit of conversation, the apple tart got upgraded to something with frangipane as T likes that in particular, so I settled on tarte bordaloue – not the chocolate bourguignonne I have had a bunch of goes at doing but a simple (!) poached pear frangipane tart (in French).

Which leaves mains. Always the last thing I settle on. Our guests – one isn’t vegetarian but doesn’t eat meat, but has a partner who likes the opportunity for meat when out of the house. My initial thought was a delicious pressure cooker based risotto – I thought it would scale up well and then you could garnish it differently, perhaps at the table – with prawns, fish or chicken depending on preference. Then T went to a dinner with DIY Buddha bowls and that turned into the main. Still use the pressure cooker to cook rice and black beans (perhaps the only positive outcome of the most recent diet – Zoe – has been the drive to eat more pulses) and assorted other protein and veg around it au choix.

In the run up, we carefully watched the weather forecast… could we eat outside? and I started on Thursday by putting all my Gu pots and espresso cups through the dishwasher. Did I have enough to do two puds and a pâté starter? You betcha I did.

On Friday it was time to make the jelly, the mousse, the tarte, the pâté, an amazing mascarpone with a vanilla bean and some icing sugar smooshed through it, and to gather the ingredients.

A melon baller is revolutionary for de-coring pears!

Saturday morning, disaster – the jelly didn’t set at all. Possibly because of my choice to use vegegel rather than leaf gelatin? I resolved to make lemon posset instead and walked down to the Coop. Maybe two desserts is enough, mused T. The very idea.

During the Friday evening cooking sesh I took a few moments out to and pick up an Amazon parcel, which I had accidentally sent to the locker up the hill, rather than the one down, containing this revolutionary idea: silicone lids for gu pots!

I know technically Pringles tube lids fit fit gu pots too, but they’re a little unconvincing – they are fine for stacking in the fridge but are too loose for transporting. These bamboo lids have silicon rings as well, and work very well. They also fit the full range of Gu pots!

On the way back I called in at the Bread and Bitter, where it was warm enough to drink outside (in a rather smoky beer garden) and that’s possibly why the tarte bordaloue ended up looking like this:

The recipe came from a French site and is not one I’d recommend. The syrup was far too thin – 2 spoons of honey in a litre of water was nothing like what I’ve used in the past (wine! sugar!) and I feared it actually pulled the flavour out of the pears rather than the other way round. I ended up boiling a few ladles of the syrup with a lot more sugar to turn it into a glaze to brush over the tart. In the end, the frangipane was more interesting than the pears.

Fast forward to the evening itself, after an afternoon of choosing crockery, we decided to eat outdoors in T’s garden. A beautiful view over the Trent valley and lots of lovely patio furniture and lighting.

The initial plan was to take the starters and the all of the dishes for the main down in one go and with many hands making light work, the outside table was soon set.

The pâté was super – simply served with nice loaf from the Co-op I popped out for just before we started.

The rice and beans in the centre were accompanied by some poached salmon, some sticky barbecue chicken, peppers, cucumber, cornichons, edamame beans, a vaguely Jamie coleslaw with red and white cabbage, apple, carrot, sunflower seeds, sultanas and a dressing of mayo, yoghurt, pepper, herbs, and celery salt. Also half cut nori sheets, balsamic mushrooms and avocados. After we’d eaten it was also possible to wrap up the nori into cones and make basic temaki sushi – an idea from the sushi packet that hadn’t occurred to me initially!

At this point there had been a spot or two of rain, quite refreshing to begin with but it got a little more persistent until we just had to grab everything – food and soft furnishings – and hurry inside.

So desserts upstairs on sofas:

A lorra lorra food! It was quite some effort to make sure I had all three puddings.

One interesting point for future use… in transporting the food I used my camping cool box. Later I bought a couple of bags of ice and stored them in there for cold drinks. I was quite impressed that the ice stayed as ice all through the evening… was still ice the following morning… and 24 hours later, there was still plenty of cubes, although it was also a little damp underneath. Now it’s turned into a science experiment… will there still be ice cubes Monday morning?