Wednesday was the evening of our annual village “Play on the green”*, which we have established a nice tradition of taking a picnic to, and trying hard not to put off the actors with our munching and opening bottles of fizz.

Last year, a cork flew onto the stage and clipped the lead actor (only a tiny bit), who was very sporting about it and threw it back at us with a smirk at the end of the play. We were mortified but it was very funny indeed. This year, we were very careful about opening the bottles, and luckily no actors were harmed during the performance despite us getting a bit of a prosecco shower from the third bottle**.

My lovely friend furnished us with this very fine picnic from M&S along with a few home made dishes (the hummous and the lentils), all of which was entirely gluten free. (How lucky am I to have friends like that?)

The M&S bits included prosciutto, spicy prawns, regular prawns, cheese wrapped in ham, mozzarella balls in pesto, olives, mixed dips, sweetcorn dip, rosemary and apricot toasts, vegetable crisps, salted tortilla crisps and spicy tortilla crisps.  All very nice.

One thing I’d not tried before was the rosemary and apricot toasts. These are thin slices of crispy toast, packed with seeds, rosemary and dried apricot pieces. They looked really fun and we all agreed they were tasty, but didn’t quite go with the rest of the food. They have a really interesting texture because they’re crispy and crunchy but you get a bit of a chew from the apricot.

We thought they would probably go brilliantly with pate, or even a bit of cream cheese as a light lunch. I’d definitely get them again.

For pudding we had strawberries with the most outrageously decadent pink champagne and strawberry cream to dip them in. We had the same at last year’s play, and I haven’t had it since, so we were all very excited to see this turn up on the table.

It’s worth a trip to M&S just for the cream! I might have to find a reason to drive down Ecclesall Road very soon…

*The play was The Scarlet Pimpernel, performed by the wonderful group of players from The Company, based at the University of Sheffield’s drama studio.

**Well, honestly it was the fourth, but that just makes us sound unruly when in fact we are very civilised and highly sophisticated.