Last night we had a rare thing - a dinner party. But it was a dinner party with a mission - to test out some of the Chocolate & Zucchini recipes. Chocolate & Zucchini is a book we will be publishing next May, by Clotilde Dusoulier. Her web site has wonderful comment on French life (yes, markets and old Le Creuset cooking pots, all mixed together with wry comment, and absolutely no berets or strings of onions).

But as the book will be coming out in America first, we had to convert the cups to grams, and some of the ingredients are pretty different. So, I baked a 'cake' with chorizo, pistachio nuts and sun dried tomatoes - perfect for picnics or to eat warm on a chilly October night, cumin gruyere choux pastry puffs, and a huge chicken udon noodle dish - enough for eight hungry people. But the piece de resistance was the wine - a bottle we had owned since 1996 - covered in cob webs, unreadable label, tasting of black currant, full of broken cork which Rhidian Brook carefully sieved out, and dark, dark red. Our other guests were Alev Adil and Barbaros Altos, who have helped us with all things Turkish. Hope they were impressed. Of course, we do this every week in London....