I’m still on fire today though for different reasons……

A while back I foolishly allowed my confidence to be badly knocked over my ability to entertain guests and I stopped inviting people here for many months. In recent times, I’ve worked out that I had nothing to be worried about and started to invite people over again. It grew and grew and we have weeks ahead of us with guests every weekend now for some time.

Today’s guests are my friends from Oxford, Julie (and her new dog, Scruffy), Susie and Tony. I know we’re going to have a wonderful evening and I have spent the morning thinking about what to cook then this afternoon cooking up a feast for them. I hope they don’t see this before coming because it will spoil the surprise.

I’m not the slimmest person in the world so I have to think about what to cook that won’t be laden with too many grammes of fat – I have a constant battle with keeping myself in reasonable shape. I swim and walk as often as I can but in my life as a corporate whore, I’m chained to my desk or to my car’s steering wheel so often and I don’t get a huge amount of time for exercise so I have to rely on my diet to keep my weight in check.

So, tonight’s appetiser is something with almost no fat at all – Ramiro peppers stuffed with tiny sweet plum tomatoes, garlic and basil then roasted slowly in the oven for three quarters of an hour until the sweetness of the peppers and tomatoes intensifies almost to bursting point. The muskiness of the garlic combines with the perfume of the basil to make a dish that is so delicious it’s hard to imagine anything nicer.

We’ll then move onto stuffed field mushrooms – stuffed with sautéed leeks, onion, breadcrumbs and stilton and served with tiny new potatoes freshly dug from the garden an hour ago, sugar snaps and French beans – both also from the garden.

Last they will all have (I don’t like sweet food) home-made Lemon Meringue Pie, made with our own fresh eggs. So tonight we will have roughly half our meal straight from our own garden and that suits me just fine.

While I was putting together the menu in my head this morning, I was thinking of what to have for my PotD today and trying to decide whether I would feel up to photographing the guests while thinking about cooking and playing hostess. I decided not but kept coming back to my pic from yesterday with its fiery overtones. I decided to try for this shot – I wanted to make it look as if my head was on fire. I thought through all the backlighting and DM ‘assumed the position’ while I focused the camera. This self-timer doesn’t half come in handy. The smoke was pure accident – I noticed that on an earlier shot there was a smoke halo appeared because the match was only just lit as the shutter fired so I adopted that technique and here’s the result. I’m pretty pleased with it.