Drinking like a fish for the RNLI
Another fund raising supper club – this time for the RNLI, who invited people to host a Fish Supper to help raise funds to keep those hearty sea faring rescuers going strong and doing their amazing work. And so the Salty Seadog Supper Club was born, with my usual crew, Jenny of Silver Screen Suppers, on board.
We spent the afternoon peeling and chopping and trying to make the kitchen at the Nunnery look presentable. It was all going very well until Jenny suggested around 3pm that rather than having a cup of tea, we should do a test run of the Sea Breeze cocktails. That slowed us down a bit, but everything was more or less ship shape by the time our guests arrived.
We started with the aforementioned cocktails (vodka, cranberry juice and grapefruit juice), served with a packet of Burton’s Fish and Chips for each guest (not homemade, but perfect for the nautical theme of the evening).
It was also a chance to demonstrate the joys of the Coupe Stack – so we had some fizz as well, before we got down to the serious business of dining and listening to a selection of great songs from my chum Davie, who offered even more than his usual Seven Songs – he performed some old favourites but also treated us to a few excellent sea shanties. There was even a hilarious interactive section. There may be recorded evidence of this somewhere…
We had a couple of cancellations, so in a departure from the usual supper club protocol, Jenny and I paid up and joined in as guests, breaking our usual “no booze till the cheese is served” rule. It was another highly entertaining evening, with charming, interesting guests, who all got on really well. I love watching our guests meet new people, discover common interests and generally have a great time together. And we raised just over £100 for the RNLI.
Jenny made these tasty little crab cakes to start – a recipe from Vincent Price’s Treasury of Great Recipes (of which you’ll be hearing more shortly…).
Next up was a fish pie, more or less based on Felicity Cloake’s “perfect” recipe.
It was indeed pretty much perfect, I have to say, and went down very well. The sauce had a generous amount of white wine and had a lovely delicate flavour. The sprinkling of breadcrumbs on the top of the mashed potato worked a treat. We served the pie with petits pos a la Francaise, also using a Vincent P recipe, and some cute baby carrots that were so tasty they needed no adornment.
A selection of great cheeses came from Wilde’s Cheese , the Urban Cheese Maker, a small award winning artisan cheese making company based up the road from the Nunnery.
More about this cheese in a future blog too.
To finish, we had these Iles Flottantes. Usually I don’t experiment too much on paying supper club guests, but these seemed like an excellent idea, given the theme of the evening. The custard was delicious, as was the almond praline. The meringues, which you poach for this recipe, were, to be frank, a little odd. I will be trying them out again, because I was a slightly flummoxed. The overall effect of the dessert was rather lovely though and the guests seemed to enjoy them. And we were all fairly well lubricated by this stage, which always helps.
Note: Drinking more than the UK Chief Medical Officer’s recommended daily intake is not recommended, obviously.
It all looks super! xx
It was a very entertaining evening! xx