friday night dinner menu

Last week, we hosted a couple of friends for Friday night dinner. On account of my being relatively anti-social and pretty lazy, this is quite a rare occurrence. I won’t speak on behalf of my husband here, because he’s not anti-social to the same degree and is certainly not lazy.

As I’m the kind of person who shapes her life around what’s for dessert, I decided to make a dairy meal, so that we could all enjoy cheesecake for afters.

 

In the middle of the week I did most of the shopping necessary, and then on Friday morning bought hallot and salad greens. The final menu was something like this:

• Olives from the bulk bins:
  • Little green cracked Syrian olives from the bulk bin – I tasted about five types before settling on the ones that I got
  • Big black Kalamata olives
  • Big black cracked marinated olives
  • The mistake I made a couple of times with tinned olives (that necessitated the preparation of olivada) has put me off the tins for a while, and there’s a really good variety of bulk olives at the supermarket
• Chopped egg
• Pickled cucumbers
• Sweet hallot – one sesame seeded and one not
• Gazpacho soup
• Pear, blue cheese, walnut, and pecan salad
• Rice and spinach bake

It might not sound like such a glamorous or generous menu, but by the time we got to the main dish (the rice and spinach bake) we could hardly fit a thing, and we had to have a bit of a rest before starting on the cheesecake.