Come Dine at 149

My housemates love Come Dine with Me. It can be almost guaranteed that at 5:30 every evening, someone in the house is watching it. Discussing the show one night, someone had the brilliant idea of us doing our own version. This resulted in diaries and pencils being pulled out and everyone was given a date of when their time to play host was. Then, a list of everyone's food hates was drawn up as well as the rules of the competition (this was all done in lots of bright colours and looked very neat and very lovely - thanks Helen).
So, we started off with Mel, doing a Mexican evening for everyone, complete with home made maracas, which was excellent. This was followed by Helen's Pirate themed evening which included a treasure hunt and all of us smashing eggs on our foreheads (luckily mine was hard-boiled!).

Last night was my turn. After a while of thinking about it, I settled on a Moroccan theme and my menu was as follows:

Pre-dinner:
Cumin flatbreads, hummus, carrot and cucumber

Starter:
Spinach falafel and salad

Main:
Moroccan spiced chicken, roast vegetables and couscous

Dessert:
Individual caramel cheesecakes

After dessert:
Moroccan tea, strawberry chocolates and minty white chocolates

Obviously I had a lot of cooking to do, so I started my preparation on Sunday.

I make the strawberry chocolates from the October Thermomix Newsletter, but halved the recipe as I didn't want 900g of chocolate! (if you want the Thermomix newsletter, just pop them an email and ask to be put on the mailing list, they are great source of inspiration!)

I then made the minty white chocolates:

400g white chocolate, broken into pieces
50g double cream
A few mint leaves
A few drops of peppermint oil

1) Put the chocolate, double cream and mint leave in the TM bowl and melt for about 8 mins, 50°c, speed 1 REVERSE blade (I didn't put the reverse on and had lots of little bits of mint in the chocolates, but if you want it like that then don't put the reverse on)
2) Add the peppermint oil (and remove mint leaves if you've left them whole)
3) Put in the fridge until fairly well set and scoop into little ball shapes (or weird oval shapes which is what mine looked like)

Then I made the cheesecake:

(serves 5)
125g digestives, broken up into crumbs (although I left some bigger pieces in too)
500g soft cheese
65g golden caster sugar
1tsp vanilla essence
7 (ish) Tbsp caramel (I used Carnation's and just mixed it a bit in the tin to make it smooth)

1) Add the cheese, sugar, vanilla and 5 tbsp of the caramel to the TM bowl and mix for about 20 secs on speed 4. I wanted a rippled look, so I stopped mixing before everything was well combined.
2) Divide the biscuits into the 5 cups and spoon on the cheesecake (I had to make sure all of mine had the same amount in otherwise there would have been arguments that someone got more than someone else).
I then spooned a bit of caramel onto the top of each one and swirled it around with the top of a knife to give it a finishing touch. I then left them in the fridge to chill.

On Monday, I made everything else!

First I made the falafel:

1 tin of chickpeas, drained
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
1Tbsp of flour
An assortment of spices: some cumin, coriander, lemon juice, what ever you like can be put in
A handful of spinach

1) I put everything into the TM bowl and pulsed on Turbo a few times until it was a smooth paste.
2) Roll into balls (this made about 20 small ones) and bake in the oven at 200° for about 20/25 minutes

Then the hummus, which I got from the Fast and Easy cook book, and just added additional flavours to it.

And finally, I made the flatbreads!

200g self raising flour (I used gluten free flour)
150ml natural yogurt
1tsp ground cumin
50ml water

1) Add all the ingredients to the TM bowl and mix on the dough setting until a dough was formed (easy really)
2) Take a handful of the dough and make an oval shape, that is fairly flat. Repeat until all the dough it used and put under a medium grill for about 5 minutes until cooked through

And that was everything I made in Stanley!
I think the meal was ok, I didn't kill anyone so that is a good sign (being a vegetarian, serving my friends chicken was a bit worrying).

We rounded the evening off with trying out Henna tattoos, which unfortunately didn't work very well but were fun anyway.

Now we've just got Sam and Grace's meals left before we reveal the winner! So I'll keep you posted on how I do.

Thank you for reading this blog, I've had some really lovely comments about it and I've had over 500 views, which is really impressive, so thank you for taking the time to read it and I hope to update you with more tales of Stanley soon!