Busy weekend part three - night in

I invited Mick and Sarah round to dinner on Sunday night so that Mick could demonstrate his newfound mojito prowess. You will notice something of a recurring cocktail theme appearing in these notes. It's all the fault of the giant cocktail book that I got for my birthday. And the fact that the E&E-CBTM index thoroughly approves of cocktails prepared and consumed at home, which are both entertaining (particularly the shaking/muddling/dropping ice cubes all over the kitchen floor) and economical (hmm... comparatively).

I thought I would prepare a lovely salade nicoise, but it would appear that the Gods of Cooking were not entirely on my side.

Sainsbury's were able to furnish me with a rather nice lump of tuna (hurray!), but my bag of salad potatoes came with at least three or four that were rotten (boo!) so all of the rest of my groceries got slimed by stinky potato juice (double boo!!). The green beans were from Worcestershire (hurray!) rather than Kenya (boo!), which was balm to my middle-class Guardian-reading conscience.

The eggs were organic free range (hurray!) but I managed to soft- rather than hard-boil them (boo!). We were able to salvage this by judicious use of the microwave (hurray!) but one of them exploded (boo!). The tuna was cooked to perfection (hurray!) but one bit was full of utterly chokable gristle (boo!).

However, all the disasters were more than balanced by the triumph of discovering that my cocktail cabinet furnished up the ingredients for mojitos, champagne strawberry spiders and saketinis (hurray! hurray! hurray!). Recipes available upon request...