Totally Tapas!

So recently at Sutton they've reinstigated the "Friday Night Food Project" - only now it's the Saturday night food project.   Basically what happens is that each month, one of the small groups gets together and caters a night of food from a different country.  Last month Gill and Adrian's small group did Sweden - and let's be honest, they cheated - they bought a load of meatballs and stuff from Ikea!  Don't get me wrong, it was lovely, and the entertainment was brill, but still - it was cheating.

Anyway, this month it was Steve's small group - which basically consists of him and Neil (and Col occasionally).  Last year when it was Steve's group's turn, he asked me to join in, as the theme was Oriental food - so we cooked up a load of Chinese food, had green tea and so on as well - and I taught the fellas how to make sushi.  It was a huge success - so when it came around this time, Steve was anxious to ensure that we lived up to our reputation.

The theme this time was 'Totally Tapas'.  We decided to make a whole load of tapas dishes - gazpacho, croquetas, chorizo, garlic mushrooms, nastillas... so Col and I went around Steve's the week before for Sunday lunch, and we downloaded the various recipes and planned what we would make.  Then, on the Saturday, we met at the hall quite early (well I was a bit later because I was giving Jamie a piano lesson - he has his Grade 3 exam in a few weeks).  Steve and Neil were there from 9, and then went shopping, and I joined them later at 11.  This might not seem like a big deal to you, but put it this way, the evening didn't start until 7pm, and we basically cooked all day non-stop!  In fact, the only break we had was a quick, on-the-go coffee and toastie from Tariro's (which is based at the hall anyway, so it's not like we got to leave the hall or anything).

I'd decided to do gazpacho and croquetas, and then help out with whatever other dishes I could.  The gazpacho (cold vegetable soup) was easy enough - although took a little while on account of we had about 50 people to cater for - but the croquetas!  Well they also were easy enough, but took ABSOLUTELY FOREVER!!!!  Have a look at the recipe here.

Those things are well fiddly, and took so long to make that I didn't get to help out with much of any of the other recipes (other than to make non-alcoholic sangria, which went down a treat!).  But we had an absolutely brilliant day preparing all the food, non-stop whistling (particularly of 'Doh, a Dear' - because Steve's son Alex had come into the kids' hall next to the kitchen and started playing it on piano - nothing is so difficult than to get rid of an annoying tune like that from your head!).

Our culinary efforts were very well received by those in attendance, so it was all worth it in the end.  What a fab day!