Well my first full weekend in the apartment and we had a Progressive dinner. I had put my name down for entree's working on the theory that if I had still been in the Hotel I would have been able to organise something quite easily. Five days out from the Friday night evening programme and I thought I would go with some dips, cheeses, crackers and vegetable sticks. (Nice and low tech, without too much preparation time) three days out from the evening and two ladies who had paired up early in the process had somehow been lost out of the system. Now to explain it would normally not be too big an issue. However this progressive dinner had a twist. At each venue there was an envelope to open at the start and end of your section of the dinner. At the start you opened your envelope to find out who was coming to your meal. At the end of your meal each of the pairs split up and went to a totally different grouping of people for their main and then the process repeated again to progress to your dessert. Another totally different group of people met up. After dessert you opened an envelope to direct you to the gathering place for everyone at the end to have a few drinks and after dinner nibbles if you could fit everything in. A great way to meet people and get a great range of food. There were 35 people that took part and you didn't see everyone until the end of the evening although you had shared food with between 18 and 24 people leading up to the party at the end.

So having given you that background adding a new group means a couple of hours re-organising all of the seating plans. It was a far easier option for me to just take the ladies into my group. Then nothing need happen to all of the timetables put together. I did get a little concerned though when I met Annie and she said we needed to put a little more effort in. Annie and Ann arrived Friday at Lunch time with several bags of ingredients, blenders, and apparently a history of flash cooking. So me being the intelligent type of chap that I am I decided that I should supply coffee and food to the experienced skill sets in my kitchen. (Which I duly did) Now have any of you had chilled soup? (Or even heard of it?) Annie had a favourite recipe for Curried Apple soup. It was finished off with drizzled cream cheese and mint. (and it was stunning) It was a fun evening and some of the food was just fantastic. Garlic roast lamb, fruit marshmellow fondues, arabian racks, merrigue cosmopolitans and trunk loads of others. Recipes traded and a couple of new salads I'll create for myself this week. Stawberry spinach and Feta cous cous for starters.