This is the bigotry I am trying to defeat

On my very first attempt at throwing a dinner party, everything was more or less a disaster. It was basically a meal of stiff salad, dry meat, thin sauce. But all this was enlivened by some twee touches: frozen cherry tomatoes, a green mayonnaise, blue curacao "cocktails". I also tried to cram as many colorful "elements" as possible onto the same plate. Next to the few forlorn slices of overcooked steak I forced in some blushing tomatoes, gangly asparagus, drunk mushrooms (literally: they had been left to drown in a huadiao jiu marinade). Then I wisened up, and decided that no, you didn't have to have laundry list assemblages on a plate to make a good dinner. The embarrassing variety went from micro to macro, intraplate to interplate. This actually leads to more craziness: you're forced to compose with more balance. Herbs cannot repeat themselves; there must be meat and seafood; main actors and a supporting cast; starches and salads, and so on. Last summer I tried to produce a banquet and ended up with a tapas buffet, where I had been forced to commit the ingredient-tautology crime by putting lots of rocket, basil and pinenuts in everything.

We learn. As A said, "your spreads have gained focus." Last night there was a roasted cauliflower soup with manchego cheese shavings that managed to stump everyone. Popular guesses were lentil, mushroom, lotus root, turnip, but first prize (for truth value) went to J's "that braised Tientsin cabbage with Jinhua ham and dried scallop dish". I was flattered (but not as much as the cauliflower was), because that's quite a lot of flavor to come through from what was really just some vegetable pulp. Everyone seems to think cauliflower is the poorer and less glamorous cousin to broccoli, but I think that's just because it's quite hard to fuck up broccoli - just blanching or steaming or stir-frying and it usually emerges in an edible state - whereas it really takes some inspired tweaking to wring any sort of credibility out of a cauliflower. It also has that anaemic color and stodgy image which are hard to dispel. Actually, that's not really true across the board. The French have a very high regard for cauliflower; ditto for artichoke and white asparagus. They definitely have a very different champion vegetable league table from, say, the Americans or the Chinese. That's key, I think: the French usually have elaborate vegetable preparations (discounting their salads). Just like some of their specialties - tete de porc, boeuf bourguignon - that rely on laborious mise en place to achieve culinary transubstantiation, lots of French veggies have their own fairy tale in which the humblest root gets to dress up in cream-and-butter finery so that it can sit respectably next to the all-star meats - leg of lamb, calves' liver. After roasting, cauliflower becomes the Cinderella to her evil broccoli stepsister: a rich and melting gold mixture that makes great soups and other preparations requiring a soft core (maybe a gratin, or fritters).

There was also a snowpea, feta, pinenut and mint salad, lamb sausages and roasted sweet potatoes with caramelized shallots and coriander, a spaghetti aglio olio tossed with shitakes, saucisson sec and lots of garlic and parsley. And for dessert, a...I'm not sure what to call it. It started life as a "warm flourless orange and ginger cake" but after a minor catastrophe in the oven, I was forced to exhume the whole lot and repave the road, so to speak. Kind of a rough job, some improvised masonry, but it turned out ok. Of course it looked nothing like a cake. A shepherd's pie, maybe, or a crumble, or an orange brownie. Topped with the gelato that A kindly brought along from Ricciotti, it was something of a personal triumph for me, and a good save, this being my second ever attempt at baking.

Thanks to everyone who came. Now I'm off to scarf up the leftovers.