Paella dinner party

It was a bonny evening and we had some bonny folk coming over, the back yarden didn’t look like total hell anymore (the green octopus is still spraypainted on the wall though :-/), so we embarked on an evening of food that we could enjoy outside and wasn’t too much of ballache to prepare – because it’s no fun spending all your time in the kitchen when there’s people over and wine to be drunk.

For starters, or more just something to pick at, we had

Shallow fried chickpeas with chilli & lime and

Home made hummous with pitta.

Yes, we like chickpeas a lot. We then had a seriously tasty and pretty simple to make paella with fresh prawns and chorizo. The recipe is a bit of a mash up between Joe’s recounting of his own recipe at 4am Liverpool airport, and some studying of the swish paella recipes from Moro cookbook who use some more exotic ingredients such as black rice and monkfish, the clever sods. I like the recipe we’ve listed here, I think it’s a good classic one that isn’t too tricky to get your head around if you’re not too nifty round the kitchen. Like me.

We ended on fridge set banana cheesecake taken from the Hummingbird recipe book (when I say ‘ended’, I’m not including the part of the evening when we begged the Italian restaurant next door to sell us some booze. We were, unfortunately, denied). Anyway, I really like the Hummingbird Bakery, How could you not?It’s just so pretty so even if you’re a bit of a crap cake maker, it’ll look good on your kitchen shelf. The only thing I find with it, is that it seems to rely on you having all sorts of kitchen wizzadry tools, a lot of which I don’t possess. Luckily, in all my cooking and baking endeavours, I’m being taught to adapt, overcome and improvise. Thus I did.

CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT WHAT I WORE

CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT WHAT WE LISTENED TO