Curry Night

Stuart out did himself - putting on a magnificent spread for the first on our curry nights! The whole day was spent preparing and cooking. My only contribution was cooking the poppadoms at 8 am in my PJ's. We didn't want the house to smell of smoke (hot oil), so I had to do them early. However, Stuart came up with a fab idea of doing them on the BBQ, therefore no smell inside. We tried with just our gas starter, but unfortunately it couldn't get the oil hot enough so I had to do it in the kitchen. As I said that was my contribution, along with laying the table!

We managed our weekly hot yoga, which was not as tough as last week; less of the strange balancing exercises and getting you body to contort in ways that are just wrong! After yoga we had to go back to Target because the previous nights purchasing had been a complete failure, I don't know how we, or rather I, did it, but 50% of what we bought was wrong. I picked up the wrong size of table cloth and a fitted sheet rather than a flat one! Both of which I only realised were wrong after taking them out of the packet!! So I had to try and fold them back into the tiny boxes they came in - anyone who has tried to fold a fitted sheet neatly knows how difficult it is! The guy exchanging them couldn't of cared less.

In all, we had nine for dinner, a mixture from work and Aberdeen University! I said we had to sit to eat pretty much as soon as everyone arrived as I said it was going to take sometime! Well it did, with our four course extravaganza finishing with jelly and Neapolitan ice cream!! Stuart made three different curries, a chicken butter balti, for those that like no heat, a chicken tikka masala, for the bit more daring, and a beef vindaloo, for the really brave! All were fab, except Stu was slightly disappointed as the vindaloo as not killer enough, even with 5 spoonfuls of chilli powder, half a pot of cayenne pepper and a blob of Dave's Insanity sauce! Although, I think Danny would disagree that it wasn't hot enough!

One thing we have discovered is mint jelly sauce does not taste like it does back home. To go with the poppadoms, Stu made up a riata, basically mint and natural yogurt. As soon as he mixed in the mint jelly we knew it was going wrong. The rieta was a lurid green colour and I tried a bit of the jelly sauce and it tasted of spearmint chewing gum! Now the yogurt tasted of spearmint, and a little bit sweet. Amazingly, some folk actually liked it but I could not bring myself to eat it!!

We finally wrapped up the party around 2am this morning still sitting outside, although getting bitten by mosquitoes I have found this morning. However, big news, Stuart had the Vortex, the electric mosquitoes catcher and killer, on all evening and it had 7 bodies in it this morning!!! So it does work, technically, but just not that efficiently!

Poor Laura had to get up to go and play a soccer match at 11am, with still a lot of curry in her belly! We are just having a lazy morning sitting around the house having finished the dishes. I am not sure what the rest of the day entails, but probably not much :)

I see it is 3 degC in Aberdeen just now - brrrrrr...... Hope all the flood water has drained away by now.