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A Free Range Life Dinner Party

I have gushed about my favourite chef, Annabel Langbein, and her amazing recipes and cookbooks to many of you before. So be prepared, this entry may contain more gushing.

You may recall that I bought The Free Range Cook on our second trip to New Zealand and although it is heavy and bulky when we're talking about a life in a backpack, I felt it was well worth carting around for weeks to have it when I got back.

So it's only natural that I also receive her email newsletter. And it's only natural that I would stick my hand up when they put out a call for people to join her Foodie Panel. I was lucky enough to be selected which meant that a free preview copy of her next cookbook was mailed to me so that I could host a dinner party for friends cooking with the book.

When it arrived, I spent a few evenings poring through it and imagining all the yummy creations that would come from it...


And I admired how well it complemented my collection of cookbooks...


Then we moved and I had to wait to get back into it and plan a menu. But finally the dinner rolled around on Saturday. I had plans to get in the kitchen by 2pm sharp so that I could leisurely prepare and enjoy it all. Well, turns out a house doesn't maintain itself and when you've only lived in it 2 weeks there are many "little things" that "just take a minute" that you find to be very necessary. Adding to that a bumped skype call, well it was about 4pm by the time I was ready to start cooking!



But the amazing part is that the recipes were so easy that I was still pretty well on track to serve around 7pm as I had planned. But by that point it would only be visiting with guests that may have delayed me :)

So, I present, A Free Range Life Foodie Panel Dinner party:








All I know is that there will be many many more delicious food memories to be made as I delve deeper into the cookbook! After a dessert of rocky road over ice cream, we took fireworks leftover from Guy Fawkes day and watched them flash up the sky. Mela had her camera and put it on a 30 second shutter to capture the show.




That one was about 8 of us running around with sparklers, cool result!


Then the sparklers fizzed out so the flashlight had to be the light.



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