MsMarmitelover and I enjoy some Thai and tea and cake

Saturday afternoon was set aside for tidying one of the 14 piles of chaos in my home, doing laundry, and cooking a slow roast beef dish for supper.

Instead I went for a quick Thai lunch with MsMarmitelover at Fitou:

Super spicy gang penang with coconut rice

Sea bass with chilli and lemon

and found myself still with her three hours later, eating cherry cheesecake at Ottolenghi:

and having far too much fun to leave.   As a consequence, my dinner party did not go off quite as planned.

To be fair it started with a disaster anyway, at 7am, when I decided to make chocolate panna cotta while hung over.  I dropped the molten chocolate in the milk, and splattered it everywhere.

although they turned out fine in the end:

The Ottolenghi Jerusalem artichoke pithivier was over-ambitious on my part.  The inside was delicious

as any combination of cream, lemon zest, rosemary, and Jerusalem artichoke would be; but I'm cack-handed as hell when it comes to assemblage:

and my crimping ended in a leak that had to be patched up with random swatches of pastry.  Nonetheless the final product tasted lush - very very mellow, and I guess next time I'll fail harder.

Being a total puff pastry novice, I decided not to bother scoring an inner-circle on my little cheese, onion and tomato canapes, and ended up with some rather rebellious snacks.

However my figs soaked in port:

and then baked into biscuits with orange zest and polenta were a delight, albeit the yellowest things I've ever made.