Sunday night supper club: casual dinner party

On Tuesday night our monthly craft nights started up again for the year.  A bunch of ladies meet at my house on the first Tuesday of the month and we have dinner and do a little bit of crafting (read talking).

With a couple of kids running around and a house to tidy up before they arrive (my house is always messy) I like to make something easy but a little bit special for dinner.   Also there's a couple in the group who don't eat red meat - so we're chicken, seafood or vegetarian.    And to top it off it's been  ridiculously hot and humid up here lately so the food had to suit the weather too.

So what to have??  I was giving the recipe for the fish curry to one of the ladies a few days before craft night and she suggested that we have it for craft night.  Winner, it's easy to make... can be easily doubled or tripled so there's enough for everyone and it fits all my other critiera.  

But it needed something to make it a bit more of a special dinner than just curry.  So we added Thai prawn cakes, chicken satay skewers, roti bread and a salad made from shredded lettuce, shredded cucumber, pine nuts and a Thai flavour salad dressing to the menu - now we're talking about a craft night feast.   And nothing particularly difficult to make, plus lots that could be done beforehand.

For desert, perfect for a hot summer's evening we ate lychee ice cream with raspberry puree.

I'd like to leave it a that so you can all think I'm terribly clever for making my own ice cream.  But in truth all I did was puree a big tin of lychees (drained), mix that into 2L of softened vanilla ice-cream.  And added some raspberry puree to the bottom of the tin and to the top of the ice cream.  The recipe was in a Real Living magazine a couple of months ago and if it wasn't so yummy I wouldn't have told you and then you would all continue to think I was terribly clever.  But it was yum, so I had to share.

What have you been eating?