I had cards here last night, with my little card group that has been meeting, eating and playing cards (or mah jongg) together for several decades now. Although we call it a card night, there’s a big emphasis on dinner beforehand. We take it in turns to host the night, and we always begin the meal with some kind of starter, then a main course, then we play cards, and when the game (Canasta) is over (the first to score 5000 points), we have dessert.

 These days I always begin the meal with bagna cauda, which is a hot dip made of anchovies and garlic and oil and butter (and sometimes a sneaky dash of cream) into which we dip raw vegies —  carrot, celery, skinny asparagus, cauliflower florets, capsicum, fennel etc. It’s delicious and feels very healthy with all the raw vegies (forget the oil and butter *g*) The few times I’ve made a different starter, people have said, “What, no bagna cauda?” so now I just do it automatically, as it’s very easy as well as yummy. I also include a sliced bread stick. (The photo above isn’t mine — I forgot to take a photo before I served it — but I’ve linked to her recipe, even though I didn’t use it.

I’ve been making Bagna Cauda (Italian for hot sauce) since I was a student in a share house and a good friend gave me an Italian recipe book for Christmas. I tried it that year, and loved it, and have been making  and enjoying it ever since. It helps that my older sisters both were given several fondue sets when they got married, and I was given one. I gave away the big fondue saucepan and just use this small stainless steel bowl I picked up somewhere — see pic on the left). But the fondue stand is very useful for keeping the dip hot

The main was a Thai chicken dish with a delicious sauce spooned over the marinated cooked chicken thighs, plus rice with pine-nuts, and two salads — a green bean and roasted pepper salad, and a rocket (aragula for Americans) and pear salad with caramelized walnuts. I’m not keen on walnuts (comes from overindulging as a child when we spent most Easters beside a walnut orchard) but caramelizing them made all the difference. It was easy and delicious and the entire bowl of salad quickly disappeared.

Dessert was chocolate self-saucing pudding, which I’d never made before but I knew it was one of the card player’s favorites. It was amazingly easy to make and was  delicious. The recipe I used (click here) was gluten-free and I served it with this mixed berry fruit salad (strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blue berries) and vanilla ice-cream. It’s spring here and it seems like a crime not to include gorgeous fresh fruit in every meal, and fresh berries go so well with rich, delicious chocolate pudding. And ice cream. 

I also forgot to take a photo of the pudding — my friends could smell it cooking and couldn’t wait before they dived in! But it just looks like a chocolate cake and you can’t even see the yummy chocolate sauce underneath.

I have to confess, I didn’t follow that recipe exactly. But it was by accident. because I was in a hurry. Basically you mix up the cake/pudding part first — just stirring it together, no fuss or beating. And then it can sit on the bench until you’re ready to bake it. So when you’re ready to bake it (45 minutes before you want to eat it)  you mix more cocoa and brown sugar with boiling water and pour it over the cake mix and pop it in the oven. But in my hurry to get the first part done before people arrived, I put all the cocoa in the cake (instead of only 2 tablespoons) and then ended up guessing the amount of cocoa for the sauce.  As my friends said, “You can’t go wrong with more chocolate” so I used 3 heaped tablespoons of cocoa for the sauce. And everyone said I should do the same thing every time I make it, because it was very chocolatey. And I will definitely make it again because it was both easy and delicious.