Birthday Raclette

Raclette is a speciality dish from around this area, and along with fondue was one of the main dishes I wanted to try when I was here! And instead of paying a lot of money to go to a restaurant, I decided to have a dinner party where I went and bought all of the ingredients, and everyone came along with 3 Euros, amking it a great deal for everyone, and a really nice shared dinner!
The dish is boiled potatoes, which you cut onto your plate, and then put sliced deli meat on top, like salami and thinly sliced bacon. Then scatter on some 'cornichons' (little pickled gherkin things), and some tiny pickled onions. While you are doing this, there are a ring of small shovels with one slice of cheese on each one, put in a raclette machine under a grill, getting browned and bubbly.
Once the cheese is all melted, you slide it off the small frying pan/shovel and onto your potato and meat , and then enjoy!
All in all, about 20 people came, and amazingly, I managed to cater for everyone! I thought I would have bought way too much, with 5kg of potatoes, 800g of cornichons, 1kg of pickled onions, 4 baguettes (in case people wanted snacks), 500g of cream cheese, and almost 4kg of special raclette cheese!!
But amazingly, the potatoes ran out before everyone had had their fill, but there was still heaps left of everything else.. so people had to have cheese on top of baguette, which all got used up too!
Unfortunately, the cornichons, onions, and cheese didn't get used up, so its been a very cheesy pickly week for me trying to use up everything.
If this all seems like a total mystery, here is a picture to fill in the blanks!

There is a plate in the middle with it all made up, yum!

Tomorrow I have decided to go to Barcelona! So there will be a massive blog post about that coming soon!!  I have a very busy week next week though so I'll try and upload about Barcelona next week, but we will have to see. Until then!