Dinner party joy

It began with a boast about gravlax.

'What's that then?' asked Emily.

'It's where you take salmon and you cure it in your fridge on a bed of rock salt (maybe with a bit of vodka too) and you serve it up with rye bread and cream cheese and dill andlemon and radishes and it's delicious. We used to gravlax a whole salmon every Finnish Independence day, and another one for Christmas lunch.'

'Ooooh! Sounds amazing. Tomaz loves seafood - can we make some when he visits from Slovenia?'

So this week, I brought together four facets of the life we used to lead, in the charismatic-but-falling-down house in Abbotsford: finnish food, good food and wine (we opened a 1998 Allsaints Marsanne - and it was a bit old, but yuuuummmmy!), a place where friends can come and just 'be', and a space where being a 'citizen of the world' is all that counts. The challenge was to put together a three course meal that had a seafood theme to all three courses. The gravlax entree (in the UK they call it a 'starter') was the easy part.

From there we moved on to a seafood risotto ('king' prawns were recently on sale at Sainsbury's - the mostly-english dinner guests all oooh-ed and aaaah-ed about the size of them, but they were soo little compared to even the ordinary prawns we get at home!) and that amazing Marsanne.

Then came my cunning piece de resistance: Guylian chocolate seashells floating on a 'sea' of mousse. The original plan was a chocolate mousse, but a week ago I realised that everything except the mousse was on the 'safe' list of a friend who is on a really insane allergy-testing regime (fish, rice, certain veg, lemons, dairy stuff as long as it's 'on the side). And apples. So I found, and followed, a recipe for a baked 'apple mousse' and it worked a treat! (More visions of all those feasts where, without batting an eyelid, we planned medieval feasts for 100, where vegans, coeliacs and even 'people who don't like onions or mushrooms' could all eat to their heart's content).

So we ate, we drank, we conversed until late on topics from here to the moon and round all the known stars. Thank you Emily, Tomaz, Brenda and Tess. I don't know why I let myself get out of the habit of evenings such as this.

I feel more alive than I have in years.