Come Dine With Me Fallon: dinner night at Oksy's

I cooked the night before.
I cooked the entire day of the dinner.
I even cooked a little bit during the dinner.
It was a cookatron like no other.

But that's what it takes to make happy food.
Slow cooked food.
It's warming and it's melting and it's of the sort where you want to try every single thing twice... or at least, I hoped that that's what it would all be like.
It was a warm and fun night.

In fact, it was so warming that Karin decided to crash it!
Ha, but then I did cook enough food to feed a small army...

So, first up, the guests!
(I'd normally would start with description of the place, but it's not a grand hall or 1.1m pad... Toby has kindly described it as a gehtto - you ring a bell and it all looks slightly ify, you walk through main door and it still looks ify. Then you climb and you climb to the very top of the ify looking building and arrive at my den. "A tree house" according to Toby. I've lived there for quite a while - it's full of stuff - books, films, shoes and cables. I'm a hermit of sorts. I do not share it with anyone other than my intrusive mother, who stays with me two nights a week. Don't get me wrong, I love her to bits. Just not on the nights she stays with me. I regress to the five year old self behaviour on said nights. And as you all know, I'm mature, compasionate and completely in control of things the rest of the time.)

Meet the lovely Isabelle, Sasha, Karin, Brad (Luq's replacement for the night) and Chris.

This is the process of making the starters.

The actual starters (two versions of each - with and without citrus - humous, baba ganoush, tabouleh, stuffeddvine leaves with yogurt and a selection of picles) on table with Hendricks G&T with cucumber.