To celebrate my wife’s 40th we held a party, for the first time really, since our kitchen ‘upgrade’ last year.

I took on the challenge of making the food (with the help of our friend Sarah) including the bread and was therefore pretty much at it from 09:00 until the guests began arriving. Never the less, I thoroughly enjoyed it and hopefully it went down well with everyone. And stayed down of course….

Having been on a relatively healthy food spree recently I went for an American theme for the evening – big flavours and plenty of it.

Centre piece was the pulled pork, which I put in the oven 130c for about 8 hours. Low and slow as I believe Heston Blumenthal put it, or maybe someone was trying to insult me, but whatever, it’s a long time. Served up in homemade bread buns, with homemade coleslaw, itself made with homemade mayonnaise it was pretty good. I think you can see why it took me all day now….

I also made corn dogs, which I first tried on a trip to Vegas. Great for parties, but wasn’t sure they were quite so good after keeping in a warm oven for an hour or so.

What else? Burgers on the barbecue of course, some southern part-fried chicken which I started in the fryer and finished in the oven and a chilli using aforementioned Heston Blumenthal’s spiced butter, which I think worked well.

Vic again made a fabulous ganache based cake and we got Helen’s colleague’s wife to knock up some great cup-cakes.

All finished off with a barrel of award winning Workie Ticket (complete with hand pull courtesy of Geoff and Catherine) and Vic’s extensive cocktail range!

A great day, or technically, two days. Salad for week now though.