The Aperitif Guy

It's been over a year since I last updated this blog. In late November last year, my Mum died of dementia, and I have struggled to maintain proper momentum ever since. However, her greatest gift to her children was a love of hospitality, so preparing food for the Christmas festivities seems the best place to pick up my writing and honour her memory. I've made my Christmas puddings today, which always brings back to me the importance of family, both natural and created. As children, we always had a home-made pudding at home. It was something my Grandma would make every year and bring with her on Christmas day. Mum was busy with young children and a large dinner (that's 'lunch' if you live in the south of England), and Grandma's pudding was a welcome help. With Grandma's death, though, the tradition of a home-made pudding came to an end, as Mum discovered the convenience of buying one ready-made from the supermarket. No shop-bought pudding ever tasted as good,...

We are advised this year to avoid large social gatherings and only mix with other people if it is “really important” to us. It’s hard to measure the importance of meeting someone, especially within families, but what we can be sure of is that big parties, even in Downing Street, are definitely out. This might be the time to consider inviting a small number of special friends or family to a festive dinner party. There is something beautiful, almost sacred, about gathering loved ones around a table. However, among all the other pressures of Christmas, we can easily lose sight of the essentials – the people – and focus on creating the perfect dinner party. Here are a few hints and tips to help you relax and enjoy time with those you love. 1 Plan for Ease Even the most confident cook can be tripped up by a previously untried recipe. Choose dishes you’ve done well before. Slow-cooked main courses are fantastic – you can put them on early in the day and forget all about them until you’re rea...

I absolutely love this season. I don't mean Christmas - there'll be time enough for celebrating that come the end of December. The season I mean is Advent - the last few weeks of preparation before Christmas really begins. In Christian communities, Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas, and so it has begun today. It is a time of heightened spiritual activity, extra efforts to be generous or compassionate, a more disciplined approach to prayer and spiritual reading. In the Orthodox Churches it is a time of strict fasting, too, and Catholics are encouraged to attend confession. It hardly sounds fun, does it, so why do I enjoy it so much? I think I have come to appreciate Advent as a buffer-zone against the somewhat frantic, enforced jollity of Christmas. There are all sorts of jobs to be done to ensure our home is clean & tidy and ready to receive guests. Food has to be made early, gifts must be bought, wrapped and delivered, cards written and sent. It can be overwhelmi...

In a recent article for Handpicked Harrogate magazine¹, I wrote about how home cooks put themselves under tremendous pressure to cook a turkey "with all the trimmings." It seems that over the last 20 years or so, we have come to expect our seasonal bird to come with a vast array of accompaniments, vegetable dishes and sauces. As far as I can tell, we only seem to have these massive expectations with turkey. Given that most of us will be reducing our Christmas guest-list this year, a 16lb turkey is likely to be too much, anyway, and I thought I'd have a look at alternatives. Chicken Before the advent of battery farming, chicken was considered a luxury meat. The idea that it had more flavour is not down to nostalgia: slower-growing breeds have time to develop more flavour but are, inevitably, more expensive to rear. Having said that, you can be confident they will have had space to roam and a generally better life, especially if you're buying from an independent butche...

It's that time of year again when we love to let go, throw frivolous or outrageous parties and bring something special to our table. It's a good time to serve cocktails, so I've been thinking about what I should suggest as my festive selection for 2019. Here are the ones I love to serve and drink. They include a few you could serve together at a cocktail party, some that are particularly suited to aperitif drinking and one that's great for winding down when the guests have gone. You'll notice a lot of overlap in the ingredients for these cocktails. The main reason for that is my love of certain spirits and liqueurs for their flavour and versatility. It's also so that you can put together a stylish cocktail party without buying a large number of different ingredients. The manufacturers of these ingredients have not sponsored me in any way, save by supplying a couple of photos for the blog. Three White Ladies The original White Lady cocktail is a thing of s...

How St Nicholas became our modern Santa Claus is fairly well known but worth revisiting very briefly. German immigration into the northern USA brought tales of the generous saint, leaving gifts of sweets and other treats in the shoes of good children on the morning of his feast (6th December). In time, these tales were conflated with the English figure of Father Christmas, dressed in green and crowned with holly, ruling over the festivities of the Christmas season. His bishop's mitre has over time been replaced with a hood and his white vestments traded for festive red, some say as a marketing tool for a certain American drinks manufacturer. The association between St Nicholas and children is particularly strong in the area of west-central Europe that became Lotharingia when the Carolingian Empire was divided in 855. The area stretched from Flanders and Holland in the north to Lorraine in the south. Although the peoples that lived in this territory lacked any kind of linguisti...

Yes, I've used the 'C' word, and it's not even half way through November! Baking, though, won't wait. Christmas inevitably involves a lot of hospitality for us, so early preparation is key if I'm going to enjoy the festivities. Many of my favourite recipes have been handed from one friend to another, one generation to the next and are recorded on old envelopes and bits of paper stuffed into the back of an old cookbook. I love the stories and memories that go with them and I'm making a point of collecting them into a book to give to my next generation when they're old enough. They may have to get used to my habit of swinging from metric to imperial measures and back again, though. I'm of that age group who were taught using both, and, although I'm equally comfortable with each, I struggle to convert from one to the other. I just use the version I've been given. A Boxing Day buffet, with cake, sausage rolls and mince pies Cakes ...

Magi arriving at the crib at Aperitif Towers Tonight is Twelfth Night, traditionally regarded as the last night of Christmas. (We count nights from Christmas Eve, days from Christmas morning.) Tomorrow, the decorations come down and “normal” life is restored. 6 th January, the feast of the Epiphany, is when the Christian church remembers the arrival of the Magi, often called the three wise men or three Kings, at Bethlehem. In the past, it has been a time of more merry-making than Christmas itself, with raucous Twelfth Night parties, spiced drinks and sweet foods all being part of that. A few years ago, a new gin came on the market called Opihr. Its heavy bottle features exotic colours and an ornate elephant. The gin itself is flavoured with cumin and coriander. It pairs well with either tonic water or ginger ale, and I loved it. Intrigued by my discovery, I wanted to know where it was made. One quick glance at the back label (with my glasses off to see the small p...