...and other amusing sidesteps into mispronunciation...

For a long time now we've been meaning to do pastes, and as luck would have it, for our latest Sunday session, we finally got around to it. Now it might just be me (read: probably), but I liken making curry pastes to participating in a prize fight. There's a lot of preparation, it seems a stupendously manly thing to do (maybe it's all that pounding and heavy equipment?), requires a great deal of mental preparedness and dogged determination, and if you don't have the audacity to endure, quite simply, you will never make it out alive...

By the end of round one, you can't see and your face is a mess.

Round two and you've lost all feeling in your hands.

And come the close of round three you're disoriented, in agony, and wondering why the hell you do these sorts of things to yourself. And in that moment of existential clarity as you teeter between throwing in the towel or sucking it up to launch one final onslaught with everything you've got, you remember...

A little effort now means you'll reap the rewards for weeks to come. Nothing, nothing compares to homemade curry pastes. And above anything else, it means that at the end of it all, you can sit down to share a good meal with good friends. And that, in my book at least, is worth it.

Ezard's red curry paste, Solomon's coriander & black pepper curry paste, Solomon's Masaman curry paste

Pretty - no. Overload of sensory deliciousness - yes.

...But before we get to dinner, there were also a couple of sweets to attend to. Since I have been test-baking for an impending celebration, we had a massive ding dong that needed to be dealt with, and there seemed nothing more seasonally appropriate than these chocolate chestnut cakes. While I had been reasonably chuffed with how the cake turned out earlier in the weekend, it must be said that my start to the day was in fact far from satisfactory. Apparently my presumption that there would be nothing to whipping together cream and chestnut puree was a rather serious miscalculation, and my underachievement in producing something which could only be described as an astonishingly accurate depiction of vomit, was nothing short of spectacular. There is no photographic evidence, as I was too busy running to the shops for more cream, sulking, and feeling a contemptible failure, but fortunately Miss Rose tidied up, and then made it all better.

Chocolate chestnut cakes

I did, however, manage to absolve myself when it came to dessert. Preparing chestnut cream may not be my forte, but when it comes to buttermilk panna cotta, now that I can do. And a pairing with saffron vanilla poached pears was not such a bad choice either.

So as the night settled in and we tidied up for the day, I started thinking; title contender? Who knows. Stuck on the ropes? Maybe. But who cares, when you can sit down at the end of the day and share this...