Dorottya doesn’t do things in half measures.

Dorottya is rather an all-or-nothing sort of person.

This whole Dinners-by-the-Alphabet started because she proposed the idea to Bernhard back when they were dating – and now, 6 years down the line, the 5 of us are all at it, and won’t stop.

It used to be all Countries, but once we made a few cosmetic changes she declared all rules are now out the window now! and we can all do as we damn well please.

So we’re doing Alphabetical Themes now.

When Dorottya chose Foraged & Floral for this dinner’s theme – being a do-it-right-or-don’t-bother sort of woman – she took her entire family, grandad included, picking berries, stealing apples, harvesting nettles, and shooting birds (Ok, they didn’t actually shoot any birds. But we did eat shot birds).

I must admit that after her last foray into the wild, with her infamous Quarantine (aka Roadkill) dinner, I had high expectations.

They were all met, and surpassed: barring side-veg, ALL the ingredients for this spectacular meal came from the ‘wild’ British countryside, mostly foraged for by her & her kin, and the whole affair was a glorious display of late-summer wildflowers.

After being warmly greeted by Papa Gabor, the greeting became even warmer with tall glasses of fatto-en-casa Rose-infused Gin, sweetened with homemade Rose-hip Jelly and chilled with ice cubes with little wild flowers or rose petals frozen into:

Then we were ushered to the garden, where the table was laid with a floral table cloth embroidered by Dorottya’s mother and a beautiful bunch of wild flowers.

The first dish was Nettle Soup – all painfully collected by our hosts – a deep-green summery soup which was completed with sour cream and a few drops of Tabasco.

Then came the birds. Oh, the birds. Three pheasants, the staple poultry of aristos back when Gaming meant trudging the countryside with a shotgun, rather than straddling the sofa with an Xbox controller.

These birds were bought from the Wild Meat Co. and oven-roasted, vaguely according to their recipe.

I had the honour of helping Dorottya carve the birds, which offered quite a fight even from their aromatic grave!

As a side, Dorottya served carrots glazed with the same Rose-hip Jelly that went in the gin cocktail, dainty baked Potato Flowers, and a leaf salad with rose petals and pansies (edible flowers):

It was all absolutely delicious.

(By the way, the rose hip or rosehip, also called rose haw and rose hep, is the accessory fruit of the various species of rose plant. It is commonly used in herbal infusions. Thank you Wikipedia)

For dessert, Dorottya made a beautiful and scrumptious Blackberry & Apple Pie, from apples and blackberries picked by her kids and Papa Gabor, with vanilla ice-cream (I think that was the only concession made to supermarket food):

This whole glorious affair was accompanied by an eclectic Spotify playlist of Floral Songs.

And as the evening drew to a close we all gazed, mesmerised, at the geese flying elegantly above, and the mosquitoes nose-diving stupidly into the massive candle…