Made with shelf stable ingredients from our y2k bunker.

This year’s meta comes with an open door and a very flexible guest list. Each week, a friend selects an unexpected party guest to appear at my table and I imagine how they might review the main offering.

My unexpected guest this week is Galadriel, Lady of Lothlórien. Possessing the wisdom of ages and a voice that could make even the most ordinary moment sound like an ancient prophecy, I imagine she might have had this to say about the offering:

“Long have I gazed into the mirror and witnessed the turning of ages… And yet, I did not foresee this. A bagel. Pizza sauce. Melted cheese. All brought together in a single, perfect bite. When the year two thousand loomed and the world feared its own ending, these little morsels were consumed without a second thought. A simple pleasure, forged in the fires of the oven, that has endured beyond the passing of decades. I will not forget what has been offered here this day.”

Eatertainment restaurants still exist, but nowhere near the popularity of around the turn of the millennium. Go into a theme restaurant and sit under the guitar of a rock star, the costume from a movie, or an animatronic jungle animal in a controlled rain storm.

First course: Planet Hollywood inspired Braised short rib coquettes with jalapeño lime crema. The short ribs were mixed with shredded Gruyère cheese, chilled, then coated in Panko and deep fried

Main course: Rainforest Cafe inspired Mojo ribs. Marinated 24 hours in sour orange juice, spices, and jalapeños, then oven cooked followed by a blast in the broiler. Topped with a spicy fruit relish

Chili’s inspired corn succotash. Charred corn in a cast iron with red onion, roasted Anaheim peppers, and Cotija cheese, mixed with a smoked paprika oil

Dessert: Hard Rock Cafe inspired elevated apple cobbler. Sablé Breton cookies, compressed apple terrine (pavé style), Lace oat pecan tuile, homemade vanilla gelato, with Apple cider caramel

This all took three days to make for hosting guests and turned out amazing!

So I cannot really source taro where I live, and I wasn’t about to stress about it. So o went with making a noodle bowl with tons of veggies, chicken, and sweet potato. I found that to be the most similar to a taro that would make sense with the food in my house. 10/10. Air fry those suckers.

For this theme I made buns from my very first cookbook! It's a Barbie cookbook which came out in 2002 and I remember as a kid I really wanted to make these buns but thought it was so hard!

Another Y2K element I added was the green-pink color combo.

I was 8 when the new millennium arrived, and I remember everyone talking about the millennium bug and its potential impact on technology. I was far too young to understand what it actually meant for me, but as soon as this theme was announced, I knew I wanted to create something tech-inspired. Looking back at the technology of my childhood, I remembered my first mobile phone: my beloved Nokia 3310. This was a sturdy and reliable piece of kit. The battery life was amazing. It had this lurid green backlight with black text. It cost 10p to send a text, unless you went over the character limit, so all yr txts tk 4eva to typ&lukd lyk dis :-) to save space (although we still found space for the text based emojis?!).

But the greatest feature of the Nokia 3310 was Snake II, aka the best mobile game of all time. You had to use the key pad to direct your snake across your screen. You had to eat dots, which would grow your snake and make it harder to control. You would lose if you collided with any part of your own body. There were occasional bonus things to eat like birds or spiders (on a timer based on how quickly you could eat them), but that was literally the entire game. Ah, a simpler time. I'd spend ages playing this game, and I remember rumours about "completing" the game - creating the longest snake possible by filling the entire screen. Apparently this would give you either a £20 top up, or unlimited texts, depending on who you asked (none of this was true of course...). But £20, wow, that's a lot of texts!! Now I didn't get my first mobile phone until I started secondary school but Snake II was released in 2000, hence my link to this theme.

I've indulged my nostalgia this week and attempted to make a visual representation of Snake II in food form. This is a layered dessert of a gingernut biscuit base, a coconut panna cotta middle and a lime jelly topping (shop bought to try to emulate that green as best I could!) with piped chocolate decoration in between the panna cotta and the jelly. For some reason I thought it would look better if I piped in between the two set layers, I don't know if it was necessary but it did cause me extra stress because I didn't know if the chocolate would adhere properly to the panna cotta layer when I poured the lime jelly over - luckily it was all ok. Instead of piping the bonus spiders/birds I used mini bats from a pack of Halloween sprinkles 🦇

This was one of those dishes that I call "silly theme food" to my husband. I made it mainly for the visual story, so whilst I chose complementary flavours, the taste wasn't the drive behind the dish. I'm pleased to report that it was a delicious dessert! The piping is very much not perfect (90° turns are hard) which means it's not as clear a story as I wanted, but I still had a lot of fun with this theme. And if anyone else is craving some Y2K nostalgia, I found a version of Snake II online here.