'I start dreading Christmas from September when the shops begin stocking up. I like the food aspect, but I find the shopping and the endless list-making trying. I'm very bad at making decisions, plus, I'm a completely incompetent present wrapper. I try to go shopping where they wrap for you, otherwise I have a long night of cursing and weeping. I don't do Christmas cards either. The children like them to be hung up, and so I try to oblige, but I have been guilty of opening them by the bin and putting them straight in. When I was really overdrawn I used to send my bank manager and my accountant one because with those people principles didn't matter, it was the sucking-up that counted.
My childhood Christmases have all merged into one hideous image. I remember it being a stressful and depressing time of year, but my attitude has changed. Christmas lunch is my absolute favourite meal in the world. I don't know if you can have a genetic tendency to like roast turkey, but if they ever find that gene I think I will be a person who has it.
I had a great-great-grandmother who I didn't know, who so loved Christmas lunch that she had it twice a year: once on Christmas Day and once on Midsummer's Day. Obviously that has filtered through. I started putting on the lunch in my late twenties. When I was married to John [Diamond] some years were spent at my in-laws, but basically I've done Christmas at home with the help of friends or sisters in the kitchen. I like cooking to be companionable.
Last year was a particularly memorable small Christmas with my children, Charles [Saatchi] and my sister. It was very nice and the whole ritual of Christmas lunch made me feel like we were establishing a household.
This year I'm going to take quite a radical step and go away over Christmas, something I've never yet had the courage to do. I haven't decided where but I feel like putting some sun in my bones. Eating is the difficult thing. I think I would find it a hugely ideological problem to eat anything other than turkey and I get depressed at the thought of a hotel Christmas lunch. I remember once being at the supermarket and seeing an old man buying a Christmas dinner for one. I just broke down and wept then and there. I really think of Christmas as family time.
My birthday is on 6 January so, even though I feel that my celebrating years are in the decline, it is a particularly festive time. In an ideal world I'd have five days in New York taking the children to all those schmaltzy Christmas shows then I'd go to the beautiful misty Tuscan hills with all the people I love most. We would huddle around the fire and eat a huge feast cooked by me.
Present-wise, there is nothing that I particularly want. Though I always find when people say "how can anyone want another scented candle?" that you can't have too many. That's the gay man in me, of course. I admit that it's easy to say you're not materialistic when you've got everything. In that sense I'm quite spoiled anyway. I get my greatest rush from earning my own money.
When it comes to Christmas food I'm completely conventional - turkey, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, bread sauce, stuffing, English mustard and sausages. Christmas lunch is easy if you forget about keeping everything hot. As long as the gravy is hot no one will notice (they will have had quite a bit to drink by then anyway).
Christmas is a pudding fest. At this time of year I pig out and find I start buying things like boxes of Quality Street that I would never eat at other times. Most of the year people say no to puddings but around Christmas people always want them because at the back of all our minds is the diet we will be starting on 1 January. The only problem I have with the actual Christmas meal is that I'm always too full up for pudding. I usually have it two hours after the main course, when I find a spare inch.'
Rhubarb fool
This is an old-fashioned, nostalgia-perfect English pudding. Make sure you use the rosiest, reddest rhubarb you can. I don't want to anger the nation's greengrocers, but I've found Marks & Spencer sell rhubarb that is reliably pink all the year around. If you haven't got any vanilla sugar to hand (though you can have, just by leaving a vanilla pod or two in a jar of caster sugar for a few days, even less if you cut the pod up), use ordinary caster sugar and add a teaspoon of pure vanilla extract to the cream when you whip it.
This recipe is not Simon Hopkinson's but is wholly inspired by it. Sometimes I serve it simply, roasted to tender pinkness, to be eaten still warm, with egg-custard ice cream. Or just use good vanilla instead.
Serves 8
1kg rhubarb, trimmed and coarsely chopped
300g vanilla sugar
500ml double cream
Preheat the oven to 190°C/gas mark 5. Mix the rhubarb and vanilla sugar together in an ovenproof dish. Do not add water. Cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour or until the fruit is completely soft. Drain in a colander, or sieve, and pour the juice (you should have about 500ml) into a saucepan, then heat and let bubble away until reduced by about half. Pour into a jug and leave to cool; do not refrigerate as the syrup might crystallise and lose its fabulous puce clarity. Purée the fruit until totally smooth, then cool and chill this as well.
Whip the cream in a large chilled bowl until lusciously thick but not stiff. Carefully fold in the rhubarb purée, then some of the reduced juice, so the mixture is streaked, rather like raspberry ripple ice cream. Put the juice in a glass jug so that people can add more, if they want, as they eat. Or frankly, you could instead use half the amount of rhubarb juice in the pan for reducing and use the remaining 250ml for adding to champagne for a fabulous, blush-pink drink.
Chilled caramelised oranges with Greek yoghurt
There is a hint of the days-gone-by sweet trolley about this. I love these oranges really cold, crispy with caramel and richly dolloped with Greek yoghurt, so you need to make them far enough in advance so that they've got time to chill in the fridge. But don't make them too far in advance: after a day, the sugary carapace will disappear, melting into the fruit's juices.
Serves 6-8
6 navel oranges or any small thin-skinned variety
500g caster sugar
250ml water
8 cardamom pods, crushed
Greek yoghurt (approx 500g)
Using a small sharp knife, cut a thin slice off the top and bottom of the oranges, and then slice off the skin vertically, turning the orange as you go, being careful to keep as much flesh as possible but removing all pith. Slice each orange into 5mm rounds, trying to reserve as much juice as you can. Just plonk the slices, pouring the juices, into a bowl as you cut them. To make the caramel, put the sugar, water and cardamom pods into a large saucepan and swirl (not stir) a little to dissolve the sugar. Then slowly bring to the boil without stirring, until the syrup becomes a dark amber colour.
Take the saucepan off the heat and tip in the oranges and any juice that's collected in the bowl. Quickly coat the orange slices in the caramel and pour on to a flat plate; act with speed otherwise the caramel will set before you can get it out of the saucepan. If you can pick out the cardamom pods without burning your fingers, great, but there's no need to get too exercised about it. Let the oranges cool, and then put them in the fridge to chill for a little while. Put the yoghurt in a bowl on the table for people to eat it with.
Vanilla shortbread
I know that biscuits sound like the sort of cooking someone else does, but you need never have baked anything ever in your life to be able to make these with ease. And I hate to say this, but they are so much better than anything out of a packet.
Makes 33 fingers
100g icing sugar
200g plain flour, preferably Italian OO
100g cornflour
200g very soft unsalted butter
seeds from 1 vanilla pod
vanilla or ordinary caster sugar for sprinkling
Preheat the oven to 160°C/gas mark 3. Put the icing sugar, plain flour and cornflour into the bowl of a food processor fitted with the double-bladed knife and give them a quick blitz (just to save you sieving, which is my most-hated job in the kitchen) before adding the butter along with the vanilla seeds you've scraped out of a pod. (Don't even think of throwing the deseeded bits of pod away: stash them in a jar of caster to use next time a recipe requires vanilla sugar.)
Process again until the soft mixture coheres and begins to form a ball, loosely clumping around the blade. Turn this out on to a Swiss roll tin and press to form an even (or as even as you can make it) layer, using fingers or the back of a spoon, or both. Be patient, it will fit smoothly.
Using the tip of a sharp knife cut the pressed-out shortbread into fingers. I make two incisions lengthways - ie to form three layers - and then make 10 cuts down - so that you end up with 11 fingers per layer. Obviously, the aim should be to cut at regular intervals but don't start getting your ruler out. Just go by eye: uniformity is the province of the conveyor belt not of home cooking. Use the tines of a fork to make little holes in each marked-out biscuit: I press down about three times, diagonally, on each finger.
Now that you've pressed, incised, and punctured, slide the Swiss roll tin into the oven and bake for about 20-25 minutes, by which time the shortbread will be pale still, but not doughy. Expect a little goldenness around the edges, but shortbread should be not crisp but melting. Remove the tin from the oven and let cool for 10 minutes or so, before removing, with a palette knife and your fingers, to a wire rack. Sprinkle with sugar and leave them to cool completely before storing in a tin.
Honey semifreddo
Semifreddo is the perfect Christmas pudding for children, they love it. You can melt it over Christmas pudding instead of brandy butter. There's no custard to make, and no churning required as it freezes, which makes life very much easier. This mellow, honey-flavoured version matches taste to texture. Sometimes when I make it, I end up with a block of uniformly buff cream; at others, I'm left with a honeyed, resin-coloured stripe along the base - or the top when you turn it out. But that's cooking for you. Either way, it works wonderfully. Pour more amber-coloured honey over as you serve, and scatter with toasted pine nuts, for quite the dreamiest, easiest pudding you could imagine.
Serves 6-8
1 egg
4 egg yolks
100g best-quality honey, plus 3 tablespoons or so for serving
300ml double cream
25g pine nuts, toasted
Line a 900g/1 litre loaf tin with clingfilm. Beat the egg and egg yolks with the honey in a bowl, over a saucepan of gently simmering water, until the mixture is pale and thick. I use a wire balloon whisk for this, but if you feel like a bit of culinarily aided whirring, it will certainly be quicker with a hand-held electric whisk. Whip the double cream until thick, and then gently fold in the egg and honey mixture. Pour into the prepared loaf tin, and cover carefully with clingfilm before putting it in the freezer for about 2-3 hours.
When it is ready to serve, turn out the semifreddo on to a suitably sized plate and drizzle this manilla-coloured log with honey, and sprinkle with the toasted pine nuts, before slicing. It thaws quickly as it stands, but that is part of its heavenly-textured charm. If you've got some pudding wine to drink while you eat this, so much the better.
· To order Nigella Lawson's Forever Summer (Chatto & Windus, £20) for £17 plus p&p call Observer book service on 0870 066 7989
