I only spend an entire day in the kitchen for people I really love

A technical hitch has meant the blog has been a bit erratic of late -- fear not, my laptop is better and usual Sunday service will resume after this week. Something which did not have a technical problem, though, was my ice-cream maker. I had lined up the arrows on the back incorrectly, although in my defence the lovely lady at Lakeland did say a lot of people had been making the same mistake. So after I had finished listening to her lovely Cumbrian tones, I made strawberry gelato (see pic for it swirling away, despite my technical incompetence!).

I heard a very interesting edition of Radio 4's Food Programme with the chomping-extra-loudly-so-you-know-she's-eating Sheila Dylan recently, in which they explained the difference between gelato and ice-cream: basically ice-cream is made with egg yolks and cream and gelato is made without egg yolks, rather less (or no) cream, and less sugar. If you've been to Italy, you'll know how good it is. As a child of the flavouring and colour fuelled 1980s, I thought I hated strawberry ice-cream for years, and would regularly swerve the pink stripe in Neapolitan cartons (remember them?!). This version had a lot of actual fruit in it, and tasted very nicely of real strawberry, rather than that sickly, bubblegum-like fruit approximation called 'strawberry flavour'.

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So, now to an effort which has made a not inconsiderable dent in my total: tapas. I had a day free to just cook, so off I went. Readers who have been checking in since the very beginning will remember I started this blog by making mayonnaise, and it didn't exactly work -- yesterday, though, I successfully made its Spanish cousin, aioli. It was very nice, although I'm sure Sam, A and C (who joined us for dinner) and I will be exuding garlic till next weekend. I roasted some potatoes and made some Spanish bread to dip into it. Somewhere along the way I missed that this bread recipe was enough for 12 servings, so was somewhat surprised when the dough wouldn't fit in my mixer; horror of horrors, I had to knead it by hand...Despite some light singeing, which I scalped off, this recipe worked brilliantly. I usually find whole loaves of bread tricky, but this was great.

Of course I wasn't calmly cooking all these in turn -- I had things proving, marinating, cooling, and cooking at the same time: chaos. There weren't any witnesses to this, but I'll share this non-sequential photo with you anyway!

The dish which needed marinating was chicken wings with cumin, lemon and garlic. These were easy enough and pretty tasty, but not wildly special. I often think that the meat on a wing is not really worth the awkward eating required -- these were just about worth the effort, but weren't the dish of the day (I think that was the aioli, actually). The other meaty offering was chorizo al vino. Dead easy is how I'd describe this, and it smelled lovely, although I didn't like it (this was maybe because I cooked it and witnessed the fat oozing out of the sausage). However, those I was feeding liked it and there were no leftovers.

Some recipes I undertake for this task are easier than others, and sometimes I make it easier for myself -- I'm not really a masochist. The quail eggs meant I covered both these bases: the salt I made to go with them simply involved a bit of grinding, and I didn't bother boiling the eggs myself. (In my defence, not only would raw quail eggs be rather hard to find in Leeds, but the idea of peeling 12 tiny eggs [I made half quantities] did not appeal.) Despite my middle-class cheat of ready cooked and peeled eggs, they were very good.

The above dishes were served up with some grilled haloumi and roast veg, and it all went down very well. I even tidied up! (See picture.)

I cannot serve a meal for beloved friends and not make a pudding -- it feels like I've made half a dinner -- so I made my Mum's mille-feuilles. Or rather my version of this dish, because when I rang up to find out how to make it there was 'no recipe, I just made it up to use up some pastry'. What I did was this (it made 8): I carefully divided up a piece of pre-rolled puff pastry into sixteen (using a tape measure so I got evenly sized pieces); oven-cooked the pastry for 5 minutes; microwaved a handful of raspberries and a handful of blackberries with some sugar to make 'jam'; sighed when the oven warped the pastry into different sizes; whipped some cream and halved 16 raspberries; carefully split each piece of pastry into two pieces; and then assembled them. This involved putting a layer of 'jam' on top of one pastry slice, adding cream and a halved raspberry, and finishing with a lid sprinkled with icing sugar. This is C's elegant hand enticing with you with the pudding of the day.

So that's 55 dishes down and 56 to go: next week I'll flop over the halfway mark, like the baby whale I am becoming -- expect mung beans and air on next week's menu -- and remain on track for not having to cook a thing over Christmas! Phew, and thank you so much if you read to the end of this outsize post.