Last Saturday we celebrated two joyful occasions at the same time: my boyfriend’s recently completed MA degree and his youngest brother’s twentieth birthday. A combined party calls for double the amount of food, so there was plenty of work to do in the kitchen. As you will probably already know, cooking is one of my favourite things in the world, so when I was asked to provide the guests with homemade party food I didn’t have to think twice!

Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my own camera, but I managed to borrow one and snap a few pics anyway. Below is a quick round-up of what we made that day, including links to recipes on this blog.

• Pickled Japanese shrimp: pickled for 24 hours in  a mixture of lime juice, soy sauce, wasabi powder and rice vinegar
• A huge amount of homemade guacamole. We used 10 (!) avocados in total.
• Smoky baba ganoush: instead of roasting the aubergines in the oven, I charred them under the broiler, to give them that deep smoky flavour.
• Roasted red pepper salsa
• Tuna salad
• Deviled eggs with horseradish, mustard and chili.
• Puff-pastry chicken & bacon rolls with basil and sesame seeds
• A large amount of tabbouleh: with coarse bulgur, lots of fresh herbs, garlic & honey dressing, tomatoes, cucumber and toasted almond flakes.

In addition my mother in law also made:

• tapenade made with olives, anchovy and capers
• puff-pastry & apple “roses” with apricot jam and marzipan
• little almond muffins

And all this was accompanied by lots of Turkish bread, tortilla chips, delicious local and not-so local cheeses, wine, beer and gin & tonic. Needless to say, nobody was hungry or thirsty that day!

One more close-up of our devilled eggs: for these kind of jobs, piping bags are key. Seriously, I’m never going to mess around with teaspoons again!