Can I just say that if you have nothing to serve for dessert, you will always be saved by massive hunks of chocolate. 

Here we are already in April and I’m only now getting to talk about our February shortlists. I’m behind, yes, but my delay doesn’t indicate a lack of dinner parties, only a lack of time to write about them.

Being back in Sydney for a week now, I’m having to get my head around lots of things

Rather than give you a detailed account of each of November’s highlighted shortlist-documented dinners, I think it’d be best to point out the themes

Here I am keeping up with my shortlisting! This one was a dinner I threw together with one hand (I have a 6-week-old) and half a brain.

Hello! It’s me. And no, I haven’t forgotten that this blog is called The Shortlists and that shortlists you expect!

Hell, I haven’t even slowed down. Call it nesting, call it psychotic, call it what you will…

This shortlist was a bit too ambitious. Though I bought all the ingredients, I didn’t even come close to attempting the bomboloni. 

Here I am, still trying to catch up on forgotten shortlists. This dinner was, unfortunately, not very memorable

So….this is embarrassing. I’ve just found all these little scraps of paper I’d stuffed into a corner of the kitchen. 

I know I said we’d be holding off from entertaining for a little while due to our house renovations but clearly we cannot help ourselves

Sydney is famous for its New Year’s Eve fireworks. (My mother called me from Israel to tell me she was watching Sydney’s light show on the five o’clock news.) 

My cooking is taking a break just when things were getting fun. Why fun? 

Ah, those passatelli. Oh, that lamb! And MAN, that CAKE!

As promised, the rest of John’s birthday feast, which, despite being filled with cooking firsts (doughtnuts! halloumi! quiche! prune cake!

Mmmm Afghan food. So glad I made your acquaintance.

Can you tell by the shortlist I was going for a Middle Eastern theme? That way, I could conveniently include my perennial pita chips with labne and za’atar. 

We are officially taking a dinner party hiatus. Not only is Francesco still sick, but the morning after the rockin’ evening documented above I woke up with an elephant sitting on my face and he stuck around pretty much all day. 

This was our last dinner party, which turned out to be a corker, as our guests might have said. Very neighborhood-centric, which is always nice.

The menu from what turned into a raucous evening with our dearly-nearly-departed neighbors, an Irishman and lots of Nick Cave music videos. And a headache in the morning.