When a friend agreed to come to lunch on the weekend, I suddenly found myself at a loss as to what to prepare!

Then came the notion of Tapas (something we’ve been meaning to do for a while—we even had a couple of bottles of Tempranillo we’d kept avoiding drinking, so we’d have them available for the occasion:-) ) Then of course, we had to decide exactly what to do…

We came up with a pretty good mix of stuff we’d done before, and new recipes—and even better, most of them could (if we’d been more on top of things!) been prepared the day before. We’re planning on doing this again!

The Labne and the Lamb Meatballs are some of Paddington’s New Year’s regulars (he commented this year that he doesn’t know why he only does the meatballs once a year). The Tapanade, Spicy Chickpea and Eggplant dips (from Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef) are fairly regular (actually, we probably do Hummus more often, but this one is good too). I added the Vegetable Fritatta (based on this), because I was worried about a lack of vegies. I still think there needs to be another vegetable dish, but this is the one that I would probably replace. The Chorizo in Cider, and the Mushrooms with Burnt Butter and Sage (made up to try and mimic the ones we had at Duende) were fabulous and will bear repeating:-)

(Edited to add links to most of the recipes.)