You can't have a dinner party without a melon baller!

I had a slightly impromptu dinner with three mates from work tonight. It was “slightly impromptu” because we’d sorta kept the night free for a potential dinner but hadn’t actually made concrete arrangements. And some people are decidedly difficult to get in contact with thanks to their shitty phone reception! It took a whole day of MSN Messenger chats, missed calls, voicemails and text messages to tell them, "Meet at my house at 7:30pm for dinner!". But by this stage it was 6:20pm... and I hadn't been food shopping yet!

I'd planned a repeat of the lemon linguine and the gooey chocolate puddings from the Fast Food chapter, based on the fact that two of my mates don't eat meat or alcohol, and that everybody seems to like chocolate. But stepping out of the house at 6:25pm into the sweltering heat, I realised that a 30 degree day is no day for hot chocolate puddings. So I changed it to a tropical fruit salad, which Nigella suggests serving with butterscotch sauce, from the Weekend Lunch chapter.

172. Butterscotch Sauce

When Dad and I got to Coles, I decided to only put good fruits into my fruit salad - mango, rockmelon, strawberries, pineapple and kiwi fruit. For too many years I've suffered the crap fruit salad - chock full of oranges and apples, with just a couple of strawberry halves for decoration. No longer! I wanted each bite to be filled with deliciousness, and no disappointing filler.

When I came home, I cut up all the fruits and stashed them in the fridge to get super cold. While cutting them up, I put the water on to boil for the pasta. Then I made the sauce, for which you just lazily stir everything together, before tossing it through the pasta.


Pasta on patio

It was such a lovely night that we ate outside... which was great, until we got devoured by mosquitos! Argh!

So we moved inside while I made the butterscotch sauce, and stayed there to eat the dessert. The butterscotch sauce is brown and caster sugars, golden syrup and butter, simmered for 5 minutes, then with cream and vanilla extract added. It smells great but is so super sweet! It was nice, but probably unnecessary, especially considering that my fruit salad was quite fantastic.


Fruit Salad and butterscotch sauce


Fruit Salad, vanilla ice-cream and butterscotch sauce

Best... Fruit Salad... Ever!