Dinner, Drinks and Don't worry, I'll head home no...ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Here I am again, catching up on the weekend after failing to blog yesterday while lying in a chair and watching the rest of Rome, Series 2. After the excesses of Saturday night that was just about all I could cope with. Sh. and F. invited me over for dinner on Saturday which is usually a guarantee of a very good night out indeed. This was no exception: we ate minestrone packed with fresh vegetables and topped with generous serves of parmesan, an impossibly tender and delicious Spanish chicken casserole flavoured with paprika and tomatoes and an utterly sinful chocolate tart, filled with milk chocolate and topped with white chocolate. There was also savoury rice and green beans with the main to soak up the juices and provide a counterpoint of green. With the meal we drank wine. Lots of wine. Sparkly white wine, still white wine and then red wine. We talked a lot, we laughed a lot.  And, as I was becoming extremely pleased with just about everything and starting to ramble, my hosts very kindly rolled me into the spare-bed around one o'clock in the morning.

 Sunday morning wasn't as brutal as I deserved it to be and it had the added benefit that I got to watch Sh. make pancakes. I've never seen any-one make pancakes like this; I've always thought of them as something that's quick and pretty careless but Sh. built up the batter in graceful, gradual runs of butter milk and waves of sifted flour on an egg base and working by the feel of the mixture. This resulted in individual stacks of perfect little pancakes with nary a lump in sight. I headed back across the bridge very happy, quite tired and slightly in awe of Sh.'s master-pancake stylings.