Matt has his Chefs Hatton: Catering for a Bonfire Night/Halloween party 40 quid

This is how the food table ended up looking on the night, it was for a combined Halloween and Bonfire night type party for grown ups with booze, so the remit was, easy to eat with one hand while trying to stay upright and look cool ...oh and cater for veggies, always odd, cooking for vegetarian vampire party guests.
As well as the usual sandwiches, all veggie by the way, chicken nuggets, sausage, crisps, carrot sticks and dips, I also made a huge veggie chilli, pumpkin soup and spinach and feta filo rolls, instead of sausage rolls.

So I started off with three huge pans and a selection of onions which I mandolined up

with my mandolin

into various sizes of cut-ness, as I wanted some shredded, some diced and some chunky

Two bags of veggie mince for the start of the chill, I always dry cook my veggie mince in the pan for a while. I find this helps the texture of the whole thing when it is finished, during this stage I will add some flavourings too, in this case some tex-mex mix with extra garlic and chilli and a very large dob of yeast extract, never leave home without it.

Dividing up the onion, diced and small bits into the pan that will end up with spinach, rings and bigger bits in the veggie mince/chilli pan and the odds and sods in what will be the soup pan, that doesn't matter as it will be blitzed later when the soup has cooked down, the larger cut onions take longer to cook and give off more sweetness

start the 1 kilo bag of frozen spinach cooking down in the onions

veggie mince, seasoning and onions simmering in olive oil, the smells are starting to release now. It's amazing just how much cooking you can do by nose, you can smell the different stage so you know when to do the next part of the preparation. like getting sauce ready etc

as this was party food on a budget I did of course use only 'smart price' or 'basics' and as I was cooking all the wet dishes the day before the party, there was plenty of time for things like kidney beans to soften and flavours to mingle, if you can, always try to do these sorts of food the day before, curries, stews, soups etc all benefit from a good sitting around doing bugger all,

so the kidney beans and passata (smooshed up tomatoes) are in the chilli

as you can see it is starting to get that nice glossy look to it. We can leave that to do its own thing over a very low heat to let it all cook through and meldge. Meldge is a word I made up to to explain this process

Poke and stir, agitate and cajole the sspinach just to make ssure it is paying attention.

Pumpkin soup time, this is my first pumpkin soup ever, usually I roast these kinds of things

so I hollowed out a pumpkin, fortunately it wasn't a sleepy hollowed out pumpkin. you see what I did there? I

I savd the outer shell of the pumpkin for decorating later and shoving a candle in it for the party, in the meantime, just cook down the pumpkin flesh with some finely chopped potato, that will help give it some body later

veggie stock cubes, two of, in a pint of hot water, chuck this in the pan and leave to simmer for about an hour on a low heat.

back to the spinach, after having drained the excess water off, chuck in a whole packet of feta, usually a 200g pack is the size they come in, this is enough for the 1 kilo bag of spinach, in this amount you want to add THE SECRET INGREDIENT and I shall tell you what that is.... NUTMEG, yes that's right, nutmeg makes this the dish that it is, the flavour it imparts is out of this world, I use about half to three quarters of a freshly grated nutmeg.

at this point I turned around in the kitchen from photographing my cooking, only to see the hound of hell on my heels , note the dinner bowl to right is untouched but she is hounding me for what I'm cooking.

next I turn my attention to the parsely, freh from the stalk, cut up in a tea mug with scissors , so much easier than on a chopping board.

lob the parsley in the feta-spinach mix, check the flavour, see it it needs a pinch of anything, you should be able to taste the parsley, feta, spinach, nutmeg equally

Prep your sheets of filo like this, add olive oil with a brush when needed

roll carefully and not too tight. brush with a butter olive oil mixture before baking, medium heat 20 minutes to half an hour turning once if you can

and they should come out all golden brown like that, you MUST cool these on a wire rack so they don't get soggy bottoms, nothing worse. that was it for day one of cooking. time for a glass or three and to let all that lot settle

so, on to day two, in the afternoon before the party, I cooked up a bunch of cheap sausages in mustard and brown sugar, I also did another lot in balsamic vinegar

I cooked up a dozen eggs, some for egg mayo in the sarnies and some like this hard boiled , with egg mayo centres, half a black olive and a dob of ketchup to make them look like eyes, Halloween stylee

I put them on a platter with ripped up hot dogs to make it look like fingers, ha ha finger food, get it? finger foo...oh never mind.

That's the pumpkin in the corner from yesterday, all carved up, the pumpkin soup was blended in the pan with a hand blender and I didn't get a picture of it as I was too busy, the sandwiches were brown bread, egg mayo with rocket, egg mayo with spicy tomato chutney and grated cheese with the same chutney. a tray full of spinach/feta filo rolls, chicken nuggets flavoured with texmex seasoning, mustard sausages, dips, bread rolls, veggie chilli, carrot sticks, stuffed vine leaves, monster munch and a couple of packets of dark chocolate fingers in case anyone had a sweet tooth.