11.12.08: Tagine redux plus pizza night out

Another night apart, 'tis the season. She partied with work colleagues, tasting wine and eating pizza while He warmed up the rest of the tagine and put together a salad of carrot, avo and the mulled wine spiced beetroot.

HE SAYS: I was sad to be eating alone but very happy to be having a second crack at the delish tagine. The flavas had intensified and matured somewhat in the 24 hours it had to chill out, mellow and get to know its fridge buddies a little better. The salad was pretty pedestrian (apart from the beetroot) but I dressed it with some chilli infused olive oil to bring it to life, which it did effortlessly.

SHE SAYS: Truly, I would rather have snuggled up to some seconds of the tagine tonite, but my extra portion will wait for a luxurious lunchtime tomorrow. The wine-tasting thingy added some techical terms to my noggin, confirmed how much I hate Chardonnay, and revealed at least one very interesting orange-blossomy German white I would have loved to sip slowly at home among friends.

The subsequent Thames-side stroll to Gourmet Pizza was less rewarding; this appears to be Pizza Exrpess' riverside cousin. (Of a certainty, they share the same dough-ball-and-garlic- margarine supplier.) My mushroom pizza with spicy chorizo add-on was a minor cut above the normal P.E. offering, though just as impossible to pick up without slice failure (toppings sliding off the soggy paper 'crust'). Still, it gets points for the sauce being less sweet and the toppings less stingy. And everyone was quite well-fed and libationed. Not to sound like a party-pooper, b/c the whole evening was nicely arranged...I've just been spending too much time at work or fretting about it to fully enjoy a colleague outing where the food was not outstanding.