Dinner night for August

One of my friends gave me the idea of having a dinner night once a month with my husband. This involves having a nice meal together, sat at the table, at least one night a month where we have something different from our standard meals. 

We decided to have this today and I chose a starter and main for us to have. The starter was crab and corn cakes with sweet chilli sauce. 

This was recipe was very easy and didn't take long to prepare. I have never really deep fried anything before so this was a slight challenge. The first lot of mixture I put in the pan just fell to pieces but the second attempt held together much better and we got some good cakes. 

We enjoyed these but I felt the taste wasn't very strong. The chilli sauce was the strongest flavour and if using that that was all we could taste. When I had the cake alone I could then taste the crab but the flavours were very subtle. 

Crab cakes with Sweet chilli sauce

For the main course we had Thai roast chicken with mango and apple salad. I decided to buy a whole chicken and joint it myself, since I now know how to do this. This is a much more economical way of doing things and we ended up with some nice large chicken breasts. This recipe was slightly more fiddley but again it was perfectly managable. I had to chop up some chilli, shallots and ginger, fry them and then stuff it under the chicken skin. This was then roasted. The chicken was very nice and the shallots had flavoured the meat nicely. The salad wasn't so nice. The leaves consisted of just corriander and mint, we found these flavours way too strong and over whelming. I would have just preferred lettuce. I like the apple in the salad and thought this went well with the mint, however, I don't like mango so didn't enjoy that. With the meal we had some rice, which the recipe suggested mix in some shallots. I didn't feel like these added anything to the rice and it was plain. The whole meal was quite dry, it needed some sauce or something. 

Thai chicken with mango and apple salad

This meal is probably not something I would have again but it was nice to try something different and have a sit down meal.