I’m happy as long as there are roasties

IS there any festive culinary joy greater than the roast potato? Fluffy on the inside, crisp on the outside, as comforting and soulful as a choir of angels on Christmas morning.

Well, not if you’re Jamie Oliver. Jamie reckons that this year we should all be cooking black roast potatoes, a recipe which calls for balsamic vinegar, garlic, thyme, red onions and my will to live.

He’s not the only one at it, either. Heston Blumenthal has been mucking about with that most sacred of Christmas pastries, the mince pie, adding a ‘spiced shortcrust’ and a ‘lemon twist’. Because if there’s one thing a mince pie has been crying out for all these years, it’s a big dollop of lemon curd.

Blumenthal is something of a serial offender in this department, probably because he has a Waitrose range to flog. He’s also got a ‘Persian spiced Christmas pudding’ featuring pomegranate liqueur (why?) and a rose butter filling (a what?), and something called a melting chocolate sprout, the less said about which the better.

When did Christmas food get so complicated? When did some bright spark look at a bowl of sprouts and say ‘do you know what those sprouts need to pep them up? Some chestnuts, bacon, stilton and a hunk of gorgonzola’ (no, really, Iceland are doing this ‘luxury’ dish for £2.50).

Even crisps – my favourite naughty festive snack – have gone doo-lally. Forget good old salt ’n’ vinegar or reliable cheese and onion, now we have Tesco’s candy cane flavoured crisps, Bloody Mary flavoured snacks from M&S, while the Co-op is doing sparkling prosecco bubbles. No offence chaps, but if I fancy a prosecco I’ll have, you know, a prosecco.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all for a bit of glitz and glamour at Christmas, as well as a hefty portion or two of festive-sanctioned gorging. But the

IF there’s one question I hate more than any other at this time of year it is ‘are you all ready for Christmas?’. Unless it’s 11.30pm on December 24, the answer is ‘no’.

thing about seasonal food, particularly the centrepiece that is Christmas dinner, is that it doesn’t need bells and whistles. It’s a meal that features a sauce made out of bread, sausages wrapped in bacon and a bird the size of a beach ball. It’s nothing but bells and whistles.

AND let’s face it, for those of us to whom the duty falls to cook the blasted thing, simplicity is key. It’s all very well for Nigella and Gordon to bang on about knocking up stuffing (‘I’d rather put a whole lot of effort into the stuffing and enjoy it but eat a lot less of it’ says Ramsay when introducing the recipe to his pork, apricot and pistachio stuffing, a statement which makes me think he’s missed the point of Christmas dinner entirely), but for those of us without a fleet of assistants to do all the chopping, whizzing and washing up, things aren’t so much of a doddle.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to make my own apricot brandy, as Nigel Slater advises in his Christmas Chronicles, steeping it for a month beforehand with orange zest and star anise, and you know what, I’m not sure it’s going to ruin my Christmas.

The glorious thing about Christmas dinner is that you can have a stonking meal without reinventing the wheel, blackening any potatoes or handing out prosecco flavoured crisps. Just don’t forget the roasties.

I’VE noticed a new trend this year for individuals to send out pious emails declaring that the money they would have spent on Christmas cards will instead be spent on charity. Honestly. Why not send out your cards as normal, give to charity the money you’d have spent on a couple of bottles of prosecco, and keep quiet about it? It’s almost as though they want everyone to know…