A Celebratory Dinner

Apologies for the lack of posts for the last week. At least I can't blame work this time! I've been back and forth between my parent's house in London and my student house in Oxford about five times in the past week! It's the end of term, so I have to come home, but I've been delaying it because of the new boyfriend. Things are going pretty well at the moment, and it's been nice to be able to spend some time together in Oxford without the pressure of essays.

So I wanted to write a post about my middle sister's graduation dinner. She graduated from Magdalene College Cambridge last week, with a 2:1 in Law. We are of course very proud of her! We all (my parents, little sister, grandparents, and my middle sister's boyfriend) went up to Cambridge for the day. We started with official photos in her college, then, after lunch, we watched all the students from her college process to the building that they graduate in, and then went back to college for a champagne tea after the graduation.

Here is a photo of the procession:



We stayed for the afternoon, and then went back home, where we were serving dinner for 10 - two of my sister's friends came too. So here is our menu:

We started with champagne, and what we refer to as 'bits'. As usual in our house, we had crisps, raw carrot sticks, a sour cream and chive dip, and olives. We also served smoked salmon and sour cream on black bread, and some cheese and walnut biscuits that mum had made.

The starter was homemade gazpacho, a cold tomato soup, that we served with chopped cucumbers and peppers, and croutons. It's one of my favourite dishes.

The main course was sea bass with chive creme fraiche, baby potatoes, and artichokes. Mum found it in Gordon Ramsay's 'A Chef for All Seasons', but it's also here. Mum was a bit worried about it, because we didn't want to prepare the artichokes or sea bass in advance, but it wasn't too complicated, and tasted really good. We just served some green beans with it, as it didn't need anything else.

We did a trio of desserts: a little piece of cheesecake, After Eight ice cream in chcolate cups, and a short bread with summer berries and creme fraiche.

We then finished up with port and cheese. We drank my port from college, which I mentioned here.

All in all a lovely dinner!