A pretty crab apple blossom

A busy day preparing a meal for this evening for six plus two later on, mostly based on Indian style food. Yesterday afternoon was spent preparing vegetables, spices and so on.  We all love the flavours although the challenge for this meal was not to include tinned tomatoes or chillies, not easy for me, in fact I made a hot chilli sauce for those of us who like some heat, it was good and worth keeping in the fridge to boost lack lustre foods. 

Part of the meal was to include a beetroot, cumin and cinnamon sorbet, not sure what a savoury ice is called, and later a cardamom and cinnamon ice cream, no cream, made with goats milk.  The milk is from K and M who joined us last night, it makes a very creamy ice cream, The latter worked very well, not sure the beetroot needs to be repeated though. 

As always contributions arrived from others including a very good fish curry using monkfish, sourdough flatbread which worked well, a beautiful fruit salad, homemade vanilla ice cream and a pannacotta.  Boomerang and Nick joined us for the dessert and brought us up to speed with tales from their recent trip away. 

A thoroughly enjoyable time preparing the food and fun evening with all including Ted who enchanted Mike, sweet. 

Extra shows the label for the main bf. The tree was planted three - four years ago, we have yet to see an apple, however the colour of the blossom  and leaves make up for that.