Black Dinner Prep

God, I'm so tired of looking at, eating, thinking about food!

I know a lot of people use dinner parties as an opportunity to show off and try new recipes on their friends but that is just way too much pressure for me. I want to be sure, without the shadow of a doubt, that I'm going to be serving something tasty, that I know exactly how to prepare, and always have a contingency plan. The boyfriend complains that I don't delegate properly, every time he slinks into the kitchen and offers to help I get frustrated with the way he peels carrots or boils water, but it's not my fault if he's doing it wrong!!!

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I've been testing recipes for the past two weeks, and have finally come up with my menu - also, that I've been eating all the mistakes and triumphs for lunch so to be honest, I'm a bit sick of black food... shhh, don't tell.

Also, I've gotten into innumerable arguments with people about how black black is. In the beginning I strove for purity, but in the last couple of days I've gotten desperate and abandoned my standards. So the final menu will be something along the lines of:

• Appetizer selection including home-made beetroot crisps, blue corn tortilla chips, tapenade, rye bread with caviar, duck saucisson (which I didn't make but you can tell it doesn't have sodium nitrate in it because of how freaking dark it is), charcoal biscuits with Guinness cheese and wasabi nori
  
• Starter is squid ink ravioli with mushrooms, black pudding and purple carrots. One of my friends told me last week that she is on a gluten free diet, um yeah, thanks a lot. I'll make a special batch of buckwheat pasta for her.
• Feijoada with black rice. If any of my guests had told me that they don't eat pork, dinner would have been canceled. I actually had other ideas for the main course but had to resort to this slightly less elegant, but amazingly delicious option when I remembered that I'm not a millionaire and realized that I don't have too much time left to play around.
• Oreo, chocolate and blackberry pie with black sesame seed ice cream. Try as I might the chocolate sorbet jut did not want to co-operate. There's a very wierd batch in my freezer at the moment that I made with caramel instead of sugar and added a few tablespoons of sweet black bean paste to in desperation. It tasted oddly 'dusty', but is pretty black.
• Drinks will be Pinot Noir, Guinness, Black Sheep Ale, Black Russians (of course!) and kalimotxo. A Basque girl used to work in my office and she told me about this combination of red wine and Coca Cola - rank, right? Well it's an acquired taste but really not too different from sangria. Ole!

Here is a list of dishes I had considered making but but didn't manage to find/taste/convince people that it wasn't gross.

• Silkie Chicken. Like a polar bear this thing has white feathers and black skin, bones and and in some cases meat. They're a common enough food in Asia but entirely impossible to source in London as a meat. That is probably because they look like this and most people who keep them in England raise them as domestic animals or for eggs only. It's totally possible to buy one from a breeder but the chances are that they're too old to eat anyway, riddled with antibiotics (to make them live longer), and once you tell the owner that you are basically planning to eat their pet, they're not going to be very likely to sell it to you. Oh and they're crazy expensive too. It's such a shame, I even had a butcher calling in favors with farmers to try and get me one, but no luck.
  
• Gordon Ramsey has a recipe for turbot poached in red wine, it's absolutely beautiful and also pretty expensive and complicated to cook well for ten people at once. Maybe next time, and I'll serve it with...
• Purple potatoes. These are not really black enough, throughout the whole planning process I've been very resistant to the option of just adding colorants to the dishes unless it was part of the original recipe (like the squid ink pasta), but maybe had these been roasted with balsamic vinegar... mmm salsify on the side....
• Huitlacoche. What is huitlacoche? Sounds so exotic, until you call it Corn Smut! This a fungus that grows in corn cobs and is actually considered a delicacy with a sweetish nutty mushroom taste, I have a recipe for chicken stuffed with huitlacoche, but good luck trying to persuade anyone to eat it.
• Marmite. This is not going anywhere near my house, my kitchen or my face. Same goes for licorice yuk yuk yukky yuk.

Pictures of the big event tomorrow ;)