A curate's egg

Had friends over for dinner last night, which was delightful, but I was less than pleased with my cooking outcomes for the evening, in fact the whole thing was a bit of a curate's egg meal, only good in parts.

The nibble starters went over well, a good double brie from Tasmania, pistachios, vegie chips and Peacamole , a delicious pea mole, adapted by Chocolate & Zucchini from ELLE à table, I found the recipe through a link on The Canberra Cook . Peacamole is what I call a 'cupboard recipe' because I usually have all the ingredients in the fridge or pantry and its quickly whizzed together. I adapted the recipe a bit by adding a squeeze of lemon juice, some lemon zest and used an organic mixed nut butter rather than an almond one.

The main meal was an organic pork roast with baked veggies, but I misread the clock, started roasting an hour earlier than I should have and didn't realise it until half way through. So everything was ready way too early and had to sit and wait, by the time it was all served up, everything had a bain marie taste and feel, like it had been sitting in the pub waiting for the lunch time crowd. I also burnt the gravy, one disaster follows another I find when the cooking starts to fall over, but thankfully the apple sauce was delicious, the recipe came from Gastronomy Domine's blog, and while the pork was almost cold, it was lovely meat. Our valiant guests ploughed through this disaster and were kind enough to make pleasant noises, but still and all, not my best meal ever.

I was hoping the desert would rescue the meal, wishful thinking sadly. I made a new dish, a black sticky rice pudding , it all seemed easy enough, time consuming because you have to soak the black sticky rice overnight, cook it for two or more hours until soft and then bake it like a normal English rice pudding. The result for all this effort was sadly very bland and pretty tasteless. I had tweaked it slightly, I used palm sugar instead of the brown specified, but I should have also included some spices to add zest and next time I will, cardomon, allspice, ginger, star anise and perhaps some lime peel to spice it up.

After this disaster of a meal, we settled down to a few games of 500 and nibbled organic fruitcake from Hominy Bakery in Katoomba with our tea, which was, as always, very good indeed.