In which I have a successful dinner party

Having found myself unexpectedly in London over a bank holiday weekend with no plans (don’t cry for me, ardent reader*), I decided to invite some of the family to mine for supper. To be perfectly frank, the idea was to impress them. Or at least to stop my Dad believing that I’m a hopeless female with an attitude problem. I’m sure that, secretly, he thinks all of his children are awesome, but on a day to day level it’s mostly a litany of disappointment for him. Anyway, he said he might like some fish, and no carbohydrates, and he would bring the wine. I decided to ignore the wine/carbohydrate paradox, and concentrate on cooking something good.

*I am seriously pleased with this joke.

I went through aaaaaaaaaaall of my cookbooks, to the extent that my bookshelf collapsed on top of me and I was hit in the face by an avalanche of words. Lacking the energy to fix the shelves, I have simply piled up all the books at the end of my bed, like a wall. Sister number 3 once told me that books wouldn’t keep me warm at night, and I have had the very great pleasure of proving her wrong for the last week, since they are very effectively blocking the draft from under the door.

Having decided on either halibut with peas, pea shoots and bacon (J Sheekey cookbook) or turbot with milk puree and baked celeriac (Phil Howard on BBC Food website), I wrote out the lists for both, girded my loins and headed for Waitrose.

As always, Waitrose was fantastic. As always, they didn’t have quite the right stuff. Instead, I picked up some monkfish and teeny scallops, threw a mishmash of the rest of the ingredients from both recipes into the basket, lost interest in the whole thing, bought some edible flowers and went home to read Pippa’s column.

I made a lemon tart (something to put the flowers on) from a Mary Berry recipe and that sorted pudding. I used some ready rolled puff pastry to make salmon and parmesan straws (J Sheekey cookbook). I remembered a recipe on a blog I love, Dash and Bella, for soft boiled eggs cut in half with crème fraiche, parsley, salt and hot sauce on top of them. So I did those too. I opened a jar of ‘pizza express olives’ – the bog standard pitted, black ones and tipped them into a nice bowl. I put some champagne in the fridge. That takes care of the nibbles, I thought, as I put on 'J'en ai marre' by Alizée (the thinking French man's Britney Spears) for the 8th time and danced around the kitchen.

Then I calmed down and made this:

Monkfish, scallops, peas
Serves 4

4x monkfish fillets
2x packets of teeny scallops from Waitrose
500g petit pois
Bunch of spring onions, finely chopped
6 rashers of smoked, streaky bacon, chopped up
1 shallot, finely chopped
1x little gem lettuce, chopped
Splash or two of double cream
Mug of vegetable stock
Pot of baby coriander and baby amaranth leaves (completely optional, they looked cute in the pot in Waitrose)
Butter
Oil
Salt and pepper

You can do everything before people arrive except cook the fish.

-In a large frying pan, soften the shallot in butter and oil, and add the bacon.
-Add the vegetable stock and let it boil and reduce by half
-Cook the peas in a saucepan of water, drain, add to the frying pan with the spring onions.
-Add as much cream as you like (within reason), season with pepper and let bubble and thicken.
-Stir through the shredded little gem, so it wilts gently.

You can leave this on the side now and have the nibbles with your guests. Things did not get off to a good start when Dad arrived with fantastic wine and asked for a corkscrew, which I couldn't find because we're more of a screw top household...

Soon enough, everyone was sitting down and I fried the fish.

-Monkfish: 4 mins on each side in a hot pan seemed to do it. Books kept telling me to season one side, fry for 4 minutes, turn and finish in the oven, but my oven doesn’t fit the handle of my frying pan in it, so I didn’t do that.

-Scallops: a couple of minutes in the same pan when the monkfish is half done.

I served this in shallow bowls (pea mixture in the middle, monkfish on top, scallops around the sides, baby leaves scattered insouciantly over the whole….) with sourdough bread and a sharp watercress salad.

Everybody said it was pretty good. Understatement.