Okay, so you know you’ve had a good party when you wake up the next day and find your kitchen looking like this.

Had some friends over to break in our new Tiki Tiki basement bar. Decided to make the spiced chickpea wraps with tahini dressing for dinner, because it’s nice and simple to make, and you can prep the ‘trimmings’ ahead of time. Plus I just love myself some tahini dressing. Who the hell doesn’t?! Weird fuckers, that’s who. And I guess maybe people who are allergic to sesame. And maybe small children. And some animals.

Anyways.

I thought some welcome drinks wouldn’t go amiss, so I made the Watermelon Hibiscus Coolers. I was super psyched to try these because I hadn’t been able to find hibiscus tea anywhere so my friend in England sent me some! That was a cool parcel.

Funny card, right? She’s a good friend. A bestie. No I’m not fucking telling you who she is. Get your own hibiscus tea dealer, k? Back off!

So I was looking for the right time to use the tea.

You know how some people are all excited about new clothes?  (Mental image –  One bitch to another: “Oh you should tooootally wear your new shoes to that party on Saturday!” *flicks hair*  Other bitch gasps, then exclaims: “I know right?! And I’m gonna throw a party so I can wear my new slutty red dress!’ *squeals in delight*)

Yeah, that’s how I am with new ingredients. It’s sad but true. I get all excited if someone brings me a bag of nuts. I’m all like ‘VANILLA PODS?!? Whaaaat?! Star Anise?!  FUCK YES!!’ The other day I went berry picking with a friend for these berries I’d never even heard of and I nearly couldn’t sleep for two days from sheer excitement.

So when I heard people were coming over, I ran straight out and got the biggest watermelon I could find. Any excuse to buy a water melon right? I mean if you need a reason to throw a party….

I steeped the shit out of the tea and then magicked up the rest of the coolers. (If you wanna know how you’ll have to get your TK book out, or ask the Thugs themselves.)

The coolers turned out to be ice-cold bad asses that would bring a coma patient back to life. They’d refresh the shit outta anyone, and you’d be a fool to turn these bastards away from your table on a hot summers day. (unless you were so seriously allergic to watermelons that ingesting some would throw you into a coma. Then you’d just have some crazy catch 22 situation going on)

I forgot to take pictures of how it looked poured into glasses, but hey I was living in the moment, okay? So just deal with it.

On to the chickpea wraps. Easy to make, just takes loads of cool spices. I’d prepped the spices, and the cucumber and carrot matchsticks in advance. My better, less foul-mouthed half made the tahini dressing. He helped chop the matchsticks too. (On a small side note, can I just say that there’s nothing sexier than a gorgeous man wielding a big knife in the kitchen?)

Okay, so confession time. I forgot to get photos of the wraps once they were loaded and good to go. However, I’m sorta glad I didn’t. How weird would it have been if I was running around the table stopping guests when they were just about to take a bite: “No wait! Don’t eat that! I need to photograph it first!” Not exactly a relaxing make-yourself-at-home kinda ambience.

However, I did get a few cold leftover wrap photos the next day at lunch time. Just as delicious as the first time round. We’d doubled the recipe, and my friend had brought a tomato salad and spinach pancakes, so we had an abundance of food. And leftovers for two days. I love myself some righteous leftovers.

 

On the second day of leftovers I ran out of tahini dressing, but I had shit loads of cilantro lying around so I decided to throw together the cilantro pesto from the Thug Kitchen blog. The blackbean and cilantro pesto wraps are one of my all time favourite Thug Kitchen recipes. Old School, from back in the day when all they had was a blog, and all we had were big appetites. I just subbed the blackbeans for the leftover chickpeas, and hey pesto! (you see what I did there? wink, wink.) And I just like to throw some pineapple in where I can, because hey, why the fuck not?

After dinner we headed down to the bar and the rest of the night is a blur of piña coladas, laughter, and Cards Against Humanity. Good times.

Tiki Tiki, bitches!

Aloha.