My dear dear friends Sam and Hazel had the best dinner party ever.


Not Your Mother's Cookbook!

That is the name of a cookbook our hosts had. It's full of unconventional food combinations and cooking methods - sometimes both. Everyone had to create one or two dishes and bring them to the party. It was a lot of fun with a lot of challenges for people's preconceptions about what is 'right' to do with food.


See what I mean?


Our hostess, Hazel. I'm sorry Sam, I should have taken a picture of you too, but the shirt was worthy of a picture anyway. Now, let's see what was on the menu...


Okay, this was what we saw when we first arrived. The green crescent-shaped items on the upper left were Apple, Sardines and Chopped liver apetif. This is one of the few things that tasted as bad as it sounded, in my own opinion. I'm not a fan of sardines though, although the apple did a bit to counter that. Below that is spiced tea eggs, boiled and then cracked in a spiced tea to infuse the tea flavour. They were typical eggs on the inside, but the outside had an interesting kick to it. In the dome is something we'll get to later. There were a couple of typical snacks that weren't from the cookbook (Well as typical as sugared cuttlefish gets, anyway.) And On the right are marshmellow and frankfurter hors d'euvres(sp?). They had a pastry-like base, and it had Kumara (Sweet Potatoes) in them. Now I *hate* Kumara, but in the spirit of the evening I tried some, and I had to say I was impressed.


...And so was Izabella.

7-Hour Mushroom, Onion & Blue Cheese Soup. This was GREAT. If you like Blue Cheese (And I doooo so much) then you'll love it.

Zuchini Cake (which I didn't get to try) and Popcorn bread. The bread was a very light bread, and tasted great with a little butter and nothing else.


This was our contribution for the evening. Flaming Glazed Bourboned Ham stuffed with Fruitcake. My camera didn't take a picture of the ham during burnination, sadly. But Lyz is a little firebug and therefore got a buzz out of igniting it. The ham was just damn good ham. The fruitcake was an interesting stuffing. The sweetness was a little odd, but then again we didn't have a very good fruitcake to work with. I'm sure if we got the real deal it would have worked well with it. After all, fruit with ham is nothing new.

Onto dessert!

darren_hale's contribution to the evening. They were quite soft, but very nice. And here's what I was going to tell you about earlier...


Ekac! Backwards Cake, in other words. It was a base of icing with a thin layer up the top and sides of cake. Stupidly, I cut myself a reasonably-sized slice of it, forgetting the ratios were switched. Thank god I've got a sweet tooth and the Ekac was awesome. Interestingly, I found myself picking the 'icing' off my Ekac and eating it before the rest of it, like I do with Cake. Myself and a few others were drinking coke to take away the sweet taste afterwards. Coke.

There were heaps of other pictures that were there that I don't have room for on my journal. Chicken cooked in a beer can, Rutebega Ring-Cake, Dishwasher Salmon, some pinto-bean fudge that didn't set, and beer floats (Beer with Ice Cream in it). It was a great idea for an occasion and if you can find the book, pick it up.