Festive Food

It seems as soon as there is a sniff of Christmas in the air, the celebrity chefs crawl out of the woodwork and start telling us how to par-boil a sprout. Granted they must film these Christmas specials in July, but that is no consolation when you're being patronised by some tubby arsehole in a festive jumper (but enough about Anthony Worrall Thompson)

The fever spreads like measles with the likes of Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith promoting supermarkets they don't shop at, while Lorraine Pascal does her best to look convincing while taking a tiny bite of something you know she won't swallow. There are so many chefs (chefs mind you not cooks) who think we have nothing else better to do than to comfit our duck legs and the likes of Gary Rhodes and the Hairy Bikers who think we should all eat more butter and lard.


Well at least these guys look as if they eat and enjoy what they make, poor old Gary wouldn't last the winter in my neck of the woods.

Then there's Nigella; curvacious, vivacious, voluptious, Nigella. Mistress of temptation. She appears before us in her silk dressing gown and slippers, licking her lips and whispering her secrets of domestic goddesshood and we can't fail to be impressed. I have seen her drinking cocktails in a low cut evening dress, rolling out a black cab in killer heels, stumbling into the kitchen as she removes her elbow length gloves and dons her marigolds and then . . . she preheats the oven.


Anyone else would be found in a drunken stupor by the firebridgade among the ashes of what was once the entire street, but not Nigella. Even pissed as a fart, she is able to set something away marinading before she falls into bed with her makeup still plastered to her face and her marigolds still on her hands.

Don't get me wrong, I love to cook and bake and make Christmas food that demonstrates how much people mean to me (nothing says I love you like homemade chocolate fudge) But I have a life and aspiring to the perfect foody Christmas presented on these shows is a meltdown waiting to happen.

I love Christmas food, but I also love shortcuts and cheating. Things come in jars and packets for a reason, so some other poor buggar can spend weeks perfecting the recipe and everyone else can just buy a jar of it. I would love to have the time to make mince pies with little stars on top, dusted with icing sugar, or a mammoth chestnut and mushroom pie just in case the one vegetarian I know comes round but I don't.

I don't have their huge, cavenous houses and cosmopolitan friends either.

Our modest little Christmas will be as it always has been, full of good cheer, good people and tried and tested favourites that might not make an impression on Masterchef, but grace my table year after year.