Cooking for Jeff's parents

I think Jeff and I could quite happily do a grown up 'dinner party' after last night!

I phoned Jeff at 12:30 yesterday afternoon to say I was going to be 30 minutes early to his house as I managed to escape from a prior engagement early. Jeff was cool about this but said he wasn't at home, he was still running around, trying to get all the ingredients for tonight's meal and unfortunately one of the Farm shops we usually go to shut at midday on Sundays so he had to head to another one! I said no problem at all and that I'd pop over his and wait for him.

Obviously when I got to Jeff's house and let myself in, I couldn't just sit there, so when I looked outside and saw the bird feeders were empty (no blame apportioned to Jeff here as he'd been working and therefore was knackered) I decided I would fill them all up which took a few minutes and hopefully meant the birds wouldn't go hungry for a few days. After that I decided I'd wash my car - great idea in theory, stupid idea in practice when I realised all I was doing was smearing the dirt around with a sponge and making it look worse than when I started - whoops :-S Whoever said that women were good at cleaning was talking out their arse.

So, Jeff arrived back home and said he had most things but still needed to get a few bits and bobs at the supermarket so I jumped in the car and we headed off. It took about 40 minutes to go round the supermarket as we kept thinking of other things we probably needed to buy for tonight, however after we had run up each isle about 10 times, bought extra plates, new small plates (for starters and deserts) we called it quits.

After getting back to Jeff's, Jeff kindly helped me clean my car 'properly' and got his hosepipe out (oo-er missus!) which helped a lot - it also meant we could water the tulips and the sweet peas which are still currently in Jeff's garage. As we only planted them a week ago, there isn't anything interesting to report, but as soon as there is, I shall be taking photographs and updating anyone who is interested on the 'Tulips and Sweet Peas from Amsterdam'!

We then decided to slightly tidy Jeff's house and prepare as much food as possible before Jeff's parents arrived. For starters we were going to do the lamb flatbreads with pine nuts and a salad - all of this was prepared beforehand which took about 10 minutes and then we could just put it in the oven when we wanted to start cooking. For main, we did the 'pan fried venison' with blackberry sauce. We did a sweet potato mash and green beans for the vegetables and didn't need to prepare any of this beforehand as it took about 15 minutes to cook in total. Pudding was the 'Ginger puddings' and we had bought some lovely vanilla custard to go with them. These took about 50 minutes to steam / cook in the oven, so Jeff and I made them up, put them in ramekins and just waited until we were cooking the main dish to put them into the oven.

His parents loved the food - even his Mother who is a very petite lady and doesn't eat very much managed to eat everything! Well, she ate the three courses, she couldn't manage the cheese board which we created after pudding (but Jeff's Dad and Jeff had a go at it!).

I headed off about 9pm which meant I could get back home, sort things out for work and not be too tired. It was lovely seeing Jeff's parents as they're lovely people and very friendly, however it was slightly weird as, of course, I hadn't seen them since we split up last time and obviously we didn't talk about that - but thoughts did keep popping up in my head such as 'I wonder if they think we're going to split up again?' or 'I wonder how much they know about last time?' Ahh well. We said we would cook for them again when we go and visit them over Easter and they seemed quite happy to let us :-)

Jeff's parents also decided to buy Jeff a lot of meat at their local butchers so I have a feeling Jeff and I will be cooking some of it on Wednesday night, when we next see each other - God knows what we will cook, but whatever it is, I will be sure to take photographs of it!

- Molly