It may be that the festive season is well and truly upon us. There is no dispute in my mind that this is the case, because in our house the lights are twinkling, the cat is stuck in the Christmas tree, pine needles adorn the floor and the scent of satsumas fills the air.
 
  It would be a bleak midwinter if this magical celebration didn't bring joy to our world. It takes a cold heart not to revert to childhood at the sight of frosted windows, bobble-hats and mince pies. It is at this time of year we come together, with families and friends and revel in the warmth of what the season is about.
 
  This year, we are none of us giving presents. Instead we are all just getting together, eating and drinking. Those of us that cook are bringing a course to the table, others the wine. It seems to me in this age of 'stuff' that we overlook what is important. I don't want anything else. Apart from maybe books, which I view as a necessity, I can't think of anything material I desire. And that feels like freedom.
 
  One great thing is that every meal can be a luxury or ceremony from now on.  They don't have to be fandangos, they can be slow-cooked stews, rich wine based dishes where the meat falls apart in your mouth, a meataphorical cuddle. Or, they can be multi-course majesties, plates delicately piled high with slices of this and scoops of that. Warm spiced smells from the kitchen as cinnamon and cloves gently caress our memories.
 
  Traditions at this time of year, as of any other, involve that comfort of familiar ceremony, which reminds us of time passed. And for me, there is nothing more comforting or ceremonial than afternoon tea. It may not be particularly Christmassy, but on cold and dark December Sunday afternoons it feels much more of a treat than in the clinking summer glasses of champagne afternoons.
 
  Our table is loaded with cucumber sandwiches, slices transparent with a light sprinkling of salt and pepper. Thinly spread buttered white bread and some, maybe a third, have a few mint leaves in them. Next to these delights are the cheese ones. Grated cheddar it has to be. Triangles of soft white bread around the slightly tangy shavings of that wonderful Englishness. And finally, on the sandwich front, we must have some ham. Trashy yet fun, these offer a piggy counterpoint to the nurseryishness of the others. I prefer these to be fingers of bread, but others may need them somehow else. And of course, not a crust in sight.
The next plate has hot, steaming crumpets piled high. Butter melting into the holes and slowing gilding the plate. A small pot of jam sits nearby but I can never really bring myself to sweeten the purity of simplicity. Being Christmas, there may be a mince pie or two warming in the oven as well. However, the king of afternoon tea, as far as I am concerned, is the combination of a still slightly warm Victoria sponge cake with a china cup of real leaf tea. The pillowy air-light sponge, the dense, sweet buttercream and the exquisitely thin layer of strawberry jam against the slight tannins of the tea are a match made in heaven. Our tea was a blend of Kenyan and Assam, enough bite to match the sweetness, but not overpowering it with mouth puckering sharpness. Beautiful.
 
  And as outside the snow and ice froze harder and the lights on the tree twinkled brighter, we thought "who wouldn't want to be here right now?"

So, you taught me. I was always eating, I watched television too. At college I followed your recipes and they opened my eyes. I shared them with friends who were amazed. We all raised glasses of wine to toast you. My mother taught me wonderful cooking, you taught me wonder. When you were rocking side to side, your cravat never moved. Tonight we all raise a glass to you, and we cook, and we mourn what seems to be another sadness from someone lonely and tragic who gave so much happiness. I'm sure there's a bar in heaven, and you'll have the time of your life. Goodbye Sir Keith.

Crab Bisque

The smashed up crab shell went in the pan along with the 20 or so prawn heads and shells I'd frozen in anticipation. You can use fresh of course, bodies to but hey, I was expecting to make this. A further 5 minutes of high heat pan-roasting and in went a large, large glug of brandy and a little fire from a matchstick. I made the crab go woof. After the pain from my eyebrows had subsided in with a large squeeze of tomato puree (half a tube). The spices went in, a good mix around happened and a minute later I added 2 tins of chopped tomatoes. A good handful of rice went in to help thicken the soup, as did half a litre of water and a big dash of salt; up went the heat, in came the boiling and five minutes later, on went the lid and down went the heat. 40 minutes passed.

Blending everything together and not breaking the blade by avoiding the black claw tips, I passed the mixture through a sieve, pressing, shaking and scraping with a wooden spoon. Into a serving bowl it went and into the freezer the rest. (After it cooled of course.) A spoonful of creme fraiche mixed with chopped taragon went in and I shut up for quite some time. Delicious.

Ah yes, Bee's birthday dinner. Part two. Of about four, it seems. And what I mean by that is that my wife has a block booking of at least a week of festivities when it comes to her birthday. Why not? I applaud any excuse for as many celebratory meals as possible and in this case, it was a landmark birthday so the meals were even more sumptuous and apples in a pig's mouth than normal. We are certainly reducing our intake in the coming week as I now can't see my feet when I stand up. It's going to be grilled fish and salad for us as we strive to get our bodies back to being temples, and not the temples of doom they have been.
Looking back at what we have been eating and drinking for the past seven days makes eye-watering reading. No wonder the steep and incredibly beautiful walk from Lulworth Cove to Durdle door in unseasonably blue-sky sunshine was not as easy as it was when I last did it eight years ago. However, nowadays we always use exercise as a justification to stuff it later in the day. After all, we deserve it. Don't we? Although perhaps an hours walk in the sun up a gently steep hill perhaps doesn't quite equate to two pints, olives, crisps, 3 bottles of champagne, 2 bottles of white wine and five bottles of red,   six tiger prawns in garlic butter each, enormous home-made burgers with fries, mayonnaise, Roquefort sauce, onion rings, coleslaw, banoffi pie, tiramisu and 6 different cheeses with sparking pudding wine.
That was between six of us though, but today it feels as if I tackled it alone. I didn't. But I'm going to try today. (No I'm not, that just made me feel ill…)
The point is, is all that has been great fun, but the best meal of all was the one on the day of her birth. Just the two of us, some Prosecco  and a good old fashioned roast chicken. Not that it was old fashioned because it was wearing a monocle and listening to the wireless when we cooked it, but because it, and here's going back some, has been eaten since the Middle Ages. Which Bee and I are fast approaching with our waistlines.
There are reasons why such food remains deeply loved rather than faddish and forgotten. A good roast chicken with all the trimmings can hold its own with the finest food on the planet. In fact, the dish should have a Michelin star itself. It brings more joy to anyone I know than any other meal. But then, it's not just a meal. It's a childhood warmth, a grandmother's love, a fireside with a good book. Of course, it has to be the best chicken you can get your hands on, we all know that by now. A chicken makes at least 3 meals and each one a joy. The next day I made chicken curry from the leftover meat and a glorious stock from the bones. The bird is not paltry, it's incredible. Especially when you use a whole packet of butter under the skin, stuff it's insides with onion, herbs, garlic and lemon then wrap it in Parma ham and serve it with deeply amber crusted roast potatoes, parsnips, almost charcoaled red peppers, curry powder roasted carrots and gravy from the juices. A good roast chicken is not just dinner, roast chicken is love.
We normally eat ours on the sofa with a good film, but Bee always has a go at me for this. She says we should eat it on plates.

The greatest compliment I can pay our host for last night was that I don't really remember eating. I know we enjoyed the food and there was certainly a cheese course, which Bee and I have decided is inhuman not to have, but it summed up the whole point of dinner with a good friend. We had quite an enormous amount of booze for a Tuesday night but the whole evening around the dinner table, occasionally propped against the fridge and sometimes in a corner of the room stroking a plant and singing, was what food can and should be about when it's not in a fashionable restaurant or delicatessen that flies it's mozarella in twice weekly on its own business class seat. You pay for that, and goodness me, this morning we paid for last night. Our host didn't present us with a bill on a silver tray with orange juice; we were at home and it would have been very strange had she appeared in our bedroom, but I do understand why most carousing takes  place with the safety net of a lie-in underneath it.
At times like that, what one does need is either a hot compress on the forehead, or the enormous comfort of warming, heartfelt proper food. I hesitate to use the word 'honest', because I have never met a lying ham sandwich, or even the word 'real', but they do apply to traditional home-cooking.
Packing Bee out of the house and gently moaning to myself, I eventually found the strength to stagger into the kitchen and start peeling a kilo of onions. You may think it a very unappealing cure but eventually one starts to shrug off the after effects and bask in the therapy of the kitchen.
The next step was to remove the cat from the chopping board, wash it (not the cat,) and finely slice all the onions. With the radio on, the kitchen warming up and the winter sun illuminating the house life was looking good. The large, heavy casserole was heating up and butter and oil gently melting. In went the onions, a couple of garlic cloves and a large pinch of salt and I started stirring. Gently stirring. I started to run a bath and then stared out the window. The pan was on a heat level somewhere just below a lighted match. I returned ten minutes later and stirred some more. I found something else to do. I tidied up a little and returned to the pan again. This was the routine for the next forty minutes or so, that's how long it took for the onions to be beautifully soft and sweet, their scent filling my head with memories of my days rowing along the Seine with Proust reading me poetry and Brigitte Bardot mopping my brow. I was feeling a little strange and it was definitely time for a change of scene, so in went the tablespoons of flour. A little more stirring and in with the white wine. Down it reduced. In went the rich beef stock and a dash of water. Up went the heat and the dark soup started to bubble furiously. Like my head. I reduced the heat again, put the lid on and went for a soak. Seeing as my wife wasn't home, I had a bath instead.
We (the soup and I,) had a simmer for about forty five minutes and both smelled delicious. All that remained was for me to get dressed and melt some cheese onto some sliced, toasted baguette, pour the soup over and be reborn. Usually, I feel cheated with just a hot drink for lunch, but in this case, it was like drinking from the fountain of youth. The only tears I shed for onions are ones of gratitude.

Tuesday 3rd February 2009 The joys of toast and honey are a joy to mouth-hold. A few weeks ago I found a jar in my cupboard from Ancient Egypt. Or possibly it was Spain before it was so-called… hold on… So, back in the Empire of Hispania, which, incidentally, is not where my honey came from (unless they had a branch of Waitrose,) and indeed Egypt in ancient times and probably to this day, they were all most likely breakfasting, as I did today, on glorious brown toast and deliciously runny hunny. It is almost as close as food gets to being under a warm duvet on a Saturday morning. Hot toast, salty butter and a long slow drizzle of golden syrupy liquid, smoothed and scraped right to the corners. On this occasion, there were some very strange looking specks in the honey, but rather like a bee in amber, I felt they were honorouble losses to the breakfast pot. And, as honey never goes off, not something that would harm me. What a tremendous start to a day. To be taken back to the comfort of an imagined 1920s childhood playing by streams in the woods. Sticky pockets full of sweets and shorts with grass stains all over. It almost hurts to be wrenched back into real life and the washing machine, the rain, public transport or the misery that is the daily news. Fortunately I had nothing on (and with thanks to the English language I stress the context as involving appointment rather than clothing,) so was able to a large degree to sit back and happily wallow. Being a second snow day, although in truth it would have been just about possible to leave the house but why push it when it's been 18 years unlike this, a world of comfort and food lay ahead of Bee and me. Isn't that just the best thing? In fact, so much so, a second mid-morning breakfast beckoned a few hours later and we found ourselves, Quantum Leap-like in a café reading the gloom sheets and drinking hot chocolates alongside raspberry and white chocolate muffins. I think, and we both agreed on this, we would be exceedingly good at being rich. As the day lazily wound around us like a cat against a radiator we watched films on the sofa, hoovered down jaffa cakes and looked forwards to dinner. In our life, the phrase "Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dine like a pauper" holds no sway. I understand the principal well, yet to forego the great focal point of the joyful evening gathering that is the evening meal is to miss one of the great moments in life. I'm not yet rotund, but if I carry on like this, I may well be. In fact, since we were married nearly four years ago, Bee and I have both increased in stature somewhat. Happiness and eating well are so closely linked that it seems we all fundamentally love the ceremony and warmth that food brings us. Either that, or we're just getting older and lazier… I wonder what's for breakfast?

Bee rubbed the snow into my face. Quite an underhand tactic and one that was going to cause her a great deal of misfortune. She admitted to me that essentially she was too lazy to bend down and pick up the snow to make snowballs so it had to be at hand height. I, however, have no compunction against kneeling if frozen pain can be the gain. Especially if the opportunity arises to launch a projectile into laden branches just as she walks beneath. These are the risks one takes if sneaky techniques are employed in the gentlemanly game of cricket. I mean snowball fighting. Which should go along the same lines. In any case, the lines I followed were along the English bowling ones and generally missed every time.

Also, I ended up falling over quite a lot. Never mind.

We just had to do it. I'm not sure why, perhaps it was a desire to play at living inside a wooden chalet, but we had to do it. At least, if we didn't, nothing much else would have done. After a cold walk in a very snowy park I cannot have an espresso or a lapsang souchong. I cannot have a pint of Kronenbourg. I could possibly have a Guinness or a large glass of red wine, but only if it's dark outside and there is a roaring log fire in a pub made out of the middle ages. What we had to do was have a steaming, rich hot chocolate. And we did. And on the side, for fun was a Jack Daniel's. Actually, it wasn't on the side, it was on the inside. And then stirred quite a lot. And then put on my inside. Gosh it's good like that. I wondered if the marshmallows that didn't come with it could be soaked in whisky and then set alight and extinguished in the dark comfort. Would that be a step too far? That, after a cold bracing snow like we haven't seen for eighteen years snow is what we had to do, and we did. It gave us just enough energy to get through the long, haunted gap until the red wine was open and dinner was being made.

A furnace glowing fire greeted our cheeks as we sat down later that evening. The sherry we were offered was withdrawn after Sue told Tim he should never ever again suggest such nonsense. I understand. I've had it before and it's a little like drinking pure sugar cane juice with vodka and Hock. Well not quite. But near enough. So the large bucket of red wine (Sangiovese in case you're wondering,) and a good few hefty handfuls of Bombay mix, was just perfect.

A comfy sofa, a warm glow inside with family company, the knowledge that supper was not far off and the wine we'd been looking forwards to having in our hands was just like Christmas Eve.

My words, a little after some more wine, were beginning to slide off the page somewhat, but that didn't stop me from shovelling the herby, spiced lamb burgers into my mouth. It was a delicious supper that night. One that, and I mean this as the greatest of compliments to the host and cook, you didn't really notice the food. The only disappointment was, as the evening was drawing to a close, Tim seemed to have misplaced his memory of the earlier in the day promise that he would dig out a particularly fine Irish single malt he had somewhere. I would have sent the womenfolk from the table and we should have discussed lofty things, such as the new iron bridge built by Mr Brunel, but alas it wasn't to be. And, to be honest, if the whisky was anything like the sherry, I'm glad.