Bliss for dinner

It began with a boast about gravlax. 'What's that then?' asked Em, on a rare quiet moment on the desk at work.

'It's where you take salmon and you cure it in your fridge on a bed of rock salt (maybe with a bit of vodka, lemon and dill) and you serve it up with rye bread and cream cheese and more dill and lemon and radishes and it's delicious. We used to gravlax a whole salmon every Christmas.'

(English people still find it soooo amazing that, when it's 35 degrees outside, Aussies eschew slaving over a hot roast turkey, in favour of seafood, maybe a bbq, cold ham, potato salad, other salads, christmas pud with ice cream, lashings of cold ones, and a swim. Does life get better?)

'Ooooh! Sounds amazing. Tomaz loves seafood - can we make some when he visits from Slovenia?'

And so a very cunning plan was born... The challenge was to put together a three course meal that had a seafood theme to all three courses. The gravlax entree (in the UK they call it a 'starter') was the easy part.

From there we moved on to a seafood risotto ('king' prawns were recently on sale at Sainsbury's - the mostly-english dinner guests all oooh-ed and aaaah-ed about the size of them, but they were soo little compared to even the ordinary prawns we get at home!) and that amazing Marsanne. Then came my cunning piece de resistance: Guylian chocolate seashells floating on a 'sea' of mousse. The original plan was a chocolate mousse, but a week ago I realised that everything except the mousse was on the 'safe' list of a friend who is on a really insane allergy-testing regime (fish, rice, certain veg, lemons, dairy stuff as long as it's 'on the side). And apples. So I found, and followed, a recipe for a baked 'apple mousse' and it worked a treat! I was soooo chuffed! So we ate, drank and nattered before the open fire until the wee small hours. Thank you Emily, Tomaz, Brenda and Tess for a lovely, lovely night.

I must do more of this.