Friends for dinner.

I love people but I couldn't eat a whole one so when we had two friends stay for the weekend a good deal of food was made and consumed instead. Here are a couple of example meals:



For a late breakfast brunch we had tomato salad and ackees, fleshy arils of the plant Blighia sapida, cooked with soya rashers, served with bread and salads.

This is a close up of the ackees, a Jamaican vegetable only available in Europe in tins. It looks a little like scrambled eggs and is fairly bland in taste so is normally paired off with something a little salty and piquant. In Jamaica salt fish or bacon is used, for vegans smokey soya rashers or smoked tofu are good substitutes for these.



For dinner, we harvested the first tiny courgettes to create a courgette tart flavoured with herbs, served with a warm salad of lentils and mushrooms in a red wine vinaigrette and some of the freshly dug new potatoes from the garden. With it we had a lovely bottle of Champagne followed by an excellent Haut-Medoc, wines considerably better than those we normally drink which added to the festive nature of the meal.