You mix up quite a stiff dough, which is then piped from a bag with a star nozzle into hot oil to fry. It took me two hands to squeeze the dough, so I had a sous chef to cut the lengths. This sous chef was getting kicked out of the house in the evening though, hence the need to reheat churros. By undercooking the sticks the first time, reheating them in hot oil in the evening worked well at finishing them off and making them crisp and warm. But serving them completely fresh is still absolutely the best way to do it … and Suzy has a very particular time for eating them too.

I served the warm chocolate sauce in individual tea cups, with a little pile of churros on the saucer. Then I brought in the big bowl of all the rest of the churros and my guests proclaimed their love for me.

It turns out that at some point during the evening, while I was doing something – probably with cheese – in the kitchen, the other three used my laptop to order tickets for my birthday present and then deleted their browsing history to cover their tracks. Just like we used to do at school.

For the record, they are not in the process of secret booking in the photo above. They were much stealthier than that. Anyway, the tickets are for kick-ass seats for us all at Cirque du Soleil in London in January. And here is where I attempt some kind of segue from hoping we don’t have to join in the acrobatics to talking about how the end of our evening turned into a ridiculously silly dance party to cheesy Mexican party music. I’d bought a bunch of tracks on iTunes to entertain my guests while I was in the kitchen, but didn’t remember them until the end of the meal. What the hell, we thought, let’s put them on now … and let’s have Suzy teach us to samba, fail at that and generally arse about. The next day I could barely walk, but it was a lot of fun.

Here’s the grand finale video:

Sometimes quesadillas are made by folding the circular tortilla in half, with the filling in the middle, but I did mine with two whole tortillas stacked with the filling in middle. They fit nicely on a baking sheet, so I cooked them in an oven rather than a frying pan. Plus, the more hands-free approach enabled me to get on with sprinkling more cheese on the kitchen floor.

I wanted to offer two different fillings, so gave everyone a quarter of a two quesadillas – one had chorizo and pine nuts with cheddar and feta and the other had mushroom, red onion and cheddar. I also made potato wedges with a sprinkling of ground cumin in the olive oil in which they were coated.

Here’s the judgement video:

Having already told you a little about the preparation I did for my Come Dine With Me evening, you know that I was getting ready for a Mexican evening. And that is why, when my guests turned up, I answered the door to them wearing my embroidered top from Ecuador and one of the four sombreros I’d ordered online. Each guest was then presented with their own sombrero as a party favour and was touchingly delighted with being given a stupid hat to wear.

I was able to borrow three margarita glasses from my Aunty Ann. There used to be four, but clearly there was a party that got Wild one night and now there are three. The glasses sat in my office for a while before the dinner party, along with a bunch of other clues as to the night’s theme such as a printout of the Wahaca menu, a Mexican cookery book and of course there was also the pile of avocados and limes in the fridge.

The pico de gallo and guacamole were pretty much the Pioneer Woman’s recipes, just a bunch of stuff chopped up and put in a bowl to look pretty. I served these as an accompaniment to tortilla chips while I put the starters together in the kitchen. If I’d been in the same room as the tortilla chips not a lot would have been accomplished other than perhaps self-inflicted dehydration as I finished the whole bag without sharing.

The first dish was tostadas – one with a base of shredded chicken and one with a base of refried beans. By the time I’d got to the end of just preparing the starter I’d already turned the kitchen into a bomb site, hence the floor being the only space for a photograph of the plated food. I suppose it wasn’t until I was into the main course that I started spreading cheese onto the floor too. I keep campaigning for a Kitchen Dog to take care of dropped food, but none is forthcoming. Still, Christmas is just around the corner …

Here’s the video from the guests:

I knew what kind of food I wanted to serve very soon after we set the dates for our second round of Come Dine With Me. The trouble was that as I was to be the last evening, months and months in the future, there wasn’t much point in using all that time to prepare, in case one of the others had the same idea in the meantime. So each of the preceding three evenings had a moment of trepidation for me: had the hostess crept into my brain and stolen my idea? We each ended up doing a certain country: USA, India and – big sigh of relief – Greece and my idea was similarly to be the cuisine of a particular country: Mexico.

I think that I’ve said before that I wasn’t overly enamoured of my first CDWM evening and so I was in competition with myself to get one up on myself and go to town on the planning and presentation. To that end I placed an order online and a few days later a big cardboard box turned up – big, but as light as a feather. What could be in it?

Although I knew I liked Mexican food, I’d never actually made any myself, so I practised my dishes in advance, working out where I’d make a few little tweaks on the night. I researched the menu of Wahaca and watched episodes of the cooking show presented by the restaurant’s founder, Thomasina Miers. This introduced me to a typical Mexican dessert that was admittedly unfamiliar to me, but I think plenty of others know it. And yes, I am being deliberately vague, you’ll just have to wait for the post.

My guests were likely to be driving themselves on the night, so the drinks needed to be non-alcoholic, thus making the otherwise obvious margaritas a no-no. So I’ve still never had a margarita and still have no idea how tequila tastes. I figured I’d make “mock margaritas” and you’ll find that if you ask the internet how one might do that, there are a lot of dreadfully clever and amusing people out there, telling people who have previously asked the same thing that a non-alcoholic margarita tastes like a margarita without the tequila. So helpful. I pooled a few ideas and decided I’d make a kind of orange/lemon/lime mix with crushed ice, put it in a margarita glass and call it a day.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find margarita glasses? I should have done a James Bond evening: martini glasses are ten a penny over here. Margarita glasses, not so much.

Also, do you know one quite effective way of crushing a bag of ice?

For dessert Helen produced a picture-perfect dish of baklava. Seriously, look at it and its beautiful goldenness. Among the layers of syrup-soaked film pastry were piles of chopped nuts and we had Greek yoghurt to drizzle on our servings. This was my first taste of baklava and writing about it now makes me want to head over to Helen’s house again and see if she’ll make me any more today.

A box of Turkish Delight was produced after dinner, which is what everyone is variously inserting into their faces or dropping on each other in the judgement video. But quite where my left earring was hiding at that moment, I do not know:

See that beautiful sunset on the wall? That’s a photo taken on one of the cruises that Helen and Steve have taken. There are such wonderful sunsets at sea, with no buildings getting in the way. We’ve had some fabulous evening skies recently that keep making me think it would be a good idea to knock down a couple of houses on the other side of the road (not yours, John) to give me a better view.

I recently acquired a small notebook. This notebook is, perhaps unsurprisingly, for notes. Notes about things that have happened, funny things that have been said. Because it seems that otherwise with my advancing age, I don’t remember these things so well and when I come to blog about Helen’s main course a while later, I know we did a lot of talking and things were good, but that’s about all I can come up with. In fact, I steal words out of my own mouth with the video, because while I remember *spoiler alert* that the meat of the lamb kleftiko served was very tender, *second spoiler alert* I say just that in the video.

So that’s lamb kleftiko with potatoes, carrots, onions and tomatoes – very cosy for a rainy late summer evening.

Any meal that starts like this has to be a winner. Am I right? I’m right. Helen’s Come Dine With Me evening had a Greek theme, with little blue and white menus laid out at each table setting. While we demolished the olives and feta, Helen was busy putting the finishing touches to the starter in the kitchen.

We were presented with a beautiful pile of Greek salad, filled with fantastic colours of olives, feta, cucumber, red onion and tomato. To accompany this were deep fried slices of courgette served with tzatziki, a yoghurt and cucumber sauce.

This is roughly how I was putting away the starter before suddenly remembering, hang on a minute, this is only the starter, leave room! It was all so light and yummy that I was just piling it in. So lady-like.

When I go to a restaurant I’m most likely to pick whatever is made of chocolate when it comes to the dessert menu. I occasionally pass this off to myself as research into finding the best chocolate cake, but really it’s just down to the fact that I like chocolate, I don’t like fruit desserts so much and creme brulée doesn’t appeal – and that about covers a standard menu.

And so I was very pleased to see Lauren’s dessert would be chocolate mousse, but not just any old chocolate mousse. No, this was fancy chocolate, orange and cardamom mousse. There were actual little bits of cardamom in the mousse, which was a very exotic thing to find on your spoon.

Do please excuse the quality of our video – there wasn’t much light by the time we’d finished eating talking!

This time around I’ve been thinking that it’s just as well I took home the menus after the Come Dine With Me evenings, because it’s taking me so long to get to blogging the meals that I’d never remember the funny names of some of the dishes. Those above though are easy – onion bhajis – and they were ever so good. I do like an onion bhaji.

Lauren had borrowed a hostess – what do you call a hostess trolley that isn’t a trolley? – thing in which to keep her various dishes warm and watching our meal being served from all these deliciously steaming compartments was great fun. So professional!

The main course was chicken tikka masala, saag paneer and aloo gobi, which as we discuss in the video, is all just a bunch of different words for things we already know. Apart from the paneer – an Indian cheese, I was familiar with all the ingredients on the plate. So this could well be a good way of tricking one’s children into eating vegetables. Paint the cauliflower yellow, call it gobi and maybe they’ll eat it.

The starter was to be salmon tikka with homemade naan bread – a very clever inclusion of Lauren’s compulsory ingredient of bread. Back when we’d sat in the coffee shop so many moons ago, writing our names on tiny scraps of tissue to randomly choose the order in which we’d host and then doing the same thing to pick an ingredient that had to be used, naan hadn’t crossed my mind when I wrote down bread.

This was one tasty dish and I’ve made it with Mum since, enlarging to main course size on a standard rather than small naan. The recipe is by Jamie Oliver. The flavours are great, the tandoor curry paste isn’t too hot and the salmon’s all piled onto the sweet naan with the cucumber and yoghurt sauce. Mmm.