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On Sunday night Mark and I went to the Blaggers’ Banquet event at the Hawksmoor Restaurant - all to raise money for Action Against Hunger. It was taking the pop up restaurant to a new level with a team having never worked together blagging food from all over the country, creating a menu using these products and then cooking and serving the food to 50 rather fussy and well eaten individuals. An amazing feat for anyone and annoyingly they made it seem far too easy!
I will leave the true art of restaurant blogging to those who, with relative ease, did a pretty good job of running a restaurant on Sunday night but thought I would drop down a few reflections on a delicious meal.
Mathilde from Mathilde’s Cuisine was our waitress for the evening with Denise from The Wine Sleuth serving us some delicious wine – we were met by warm happy smiles all round which gave the evening a great personal and friendly feeling.
Each course was matched with a different wine but I stuck to the delicious Portugese wine from Casa Leal, called Quinta Lagoalva De Cima, for most of the evening which was incredibly enjoyable… mmm yes I was feeling a little weary on Monday morning thanks to the Wine Sleuth’s efficient pouring!

Ok so i’m not going to go through the whole menu but i took a few photos of my favourite parts.. starting with these canapes made of deep fried crispy chicken skin (or were they roasted)… a similar idea to our pork scratchings (but i think ours may be a lot healthier!) we would really love to put something like this on our menu.. such a treat to have alongside a drink – in fact i would have been satisfied if that was all i was given for the whole evening!

Lancashire Hot pot is the next thing I want to tell you about as it is such a school dish that gets ruined time and time again but this was so tender and flavoursome that I had seconds and thirds of it - despite also having a melt in the mouth buffalo steak and a tasty beef stew, which was all soaked up with some good fresh bread blagged from St Johns.

This was all followed by a gooey chocolate fondant cake and some extraordinary “Titillating jellies” which the man i was sitting next to was finding hard to cut up! Cheese, coffee, wine, more wine and auctions (brilliantly led by Tim Hayward) followed which brought us all back to why we were all still there! We have donated and created for this one off occasion a voucher for a cooking class with Tommi for eight people and no more at one of the Wahaca restaurants. Two tickets were in the raffle, two were auctioned off and 4 more are to go online – click here to check out the auction list and it should be going up over the next week.
This is a great and different christmas present for any friend of relative who is interested in Mexican food or just food in general so make sure you all get bidding.
We are secretly hoping the bloggers set up permanent shop somewhere soon, however from the tired faces showing when we left on Sunday night i think they might revert back to blogging… will have to wait until next year!
by cecilia : Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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