Tuesday 12 January 2010

Worked at home today and started work on clearing the 192 work emails and 200+ County Council emails. Quite a few complaints about gritting in there.

My friend, Margaret, and her family are coming to dinner in a couple of weeks. I think she is expecting us to do a veggie Burn's Night like we did a couple of years back. However instead we are doing a meal based on our recent holiday to Chile and Argentina.

Tonight was the first practice run and I tried to recreate a meal that we had last Thursday in a film themed restaurant on the Avenida de Mayo. Butternut squash a la Milanesa on a bed of creamed spinach.

As I have never made creamed spinach before, I looked on Google and decided to go for Hugh Fearnley-Whittenstall's recipe from River Cottage.
http://www.channel4.com/food/recipes/chefs/hugh-fearnley-whittingstall/ultimate-creamed-spinach-recipe_p_1.html


The hubs rang from Asda to say they were out of butternut squash so I swapped the squash for aubergine. I love aubergine and its black skin. I sometimes just buy aubergines because they look so good.

We bought a bottle of Pisco back with us and hubs - an ace cocktail waiter - was practising for the dinner party. I had my first Pisco Sour in Argentina - though it is the national drink of Chile and Peru (Pisco is in Peru). He did well but it was not as frothy as the one I had in Bariloche.

It involved two measures of Pisco, the juice of half a lime, one teaspoon of cane sugar syrup, half an egg white, a dash of Angosturas bitters, shaken with ice and strained into a glass with a rim coated in sugar.

More investigation required.

I made the creamed spinach. I had only asked hubs to buy spinach, not baby spinach, so I had to destalk each leaf. Yawn! HFW's recipe required the milk base for the sauce to be an infusion of bay leaf and onion. I love that smell. It reminds me of bread sauce at Christmas. Next time I might drop in a clove or three.

In all I found the HFW recipe a bit stodgy and will mostlikely make it again with a cream base rather than a white sauce.

The aubergine? It was 10 mm slices, egged and crumbed, deep fried for about three mins. Deep fried aubergine is evil. It soaks up all the fat and delivers a deliciously different, biteworthy delight! Not for weightwatchers.

All washed down with a bottle of Crozes Hermitage, followed by a plummy Carmenere.

Bliss!