Christmas feast

Today we are shooting the Christmas Feasts and the house is full of trays of lights, boxes of crackers, silver boxes of TV kit and all the Christmas food - there seems to be a huge amount of it! The drive is full of cars and vans and there are people all over the place setting up lights, running out cables and talking technicalities.

We've already been to Yorkshire to my old stamping ground to film the making of a Yorkshire Pot, the very unusual dish that will be at the centre of our special Christmas Day menu. We stayed overnight in a local hotel... my sous chef Chris and I arrived very late after driving from a food fair in Malvern... it was only when I punched it into the satnav that we realised how far it was! I always love arriving in the dark and then waking up to be greeted by the sight of the fabulous hills of Yorkshire. I walked up onto the bridge by the hotel to get some fresh air on board.

Anyway make sure you watch the show. Even if you don't get the fresh air you will find out what a Yorkshire Pot is and by the way they did a great breakfast too…local black pudding and fresh eggs, the full English - certainly enough to keep me going all day!

Game feast

Do you find cooking very emotional? I find that onions (sometimes) and chillies (always!) reduce me to moist eyed semi blindness. We are getting into a good routine with the film crew and kitchen helpers. After each course we all clean the set and get all the ingredients for the next dish lined up. There's always the risk of slapstick incidents with all the doors opening and shutting like a panto bakery scene while plates piled with food are rushed back and forth. Fingers crossed we get through the series without any major laundry bills. In fact we were so far ahead of schedule on "the game show" that the kitchen produced hot bacon butties for everyone, though the sound man made the mistake of turning his back while my ever-hungry dog Fudge was passing so he lost his!

Cooking the starter was funny, as you will see on the show. To make the chilli and cucumber pickle I roast off the chillies in the pan, fine so far, but the fun came when I added the rice wine. I think all the chilli in the air must have overwhelmed the ventilation system. It certainly overwhelmed Alex and John on camera, who got to the point where their eyes were streaming so much I was just a blur in their viewfinders. They did well to hold on as much as they did but eventually they couldn’t take it anymore, so we stopped for a 3 minute coffee, or more precisely coughing, break. I don’t think they're real Yorkshiremen!

Beef feast

I decided to introduce an element of competition this week between the French and the English. My idea was that the loser at the Clay Pigeon shoot would have to cook us up something to keep the cold out. So when (in my mind it was always “when” not ever “if”!) Daniel Galmiche lost we had his authentically French Coq au Vin for lunch. In fact Daniel and Lawrence Keogh from ROAST, who was also along for the day, must have enjoyed themselves at this shoot at the shoot, ‘cos they came on with the crew and I to Hampshire Game, where we bought the venison for a main dish. In fact they were so busy looking round to se what else there was to buy that the Director twice had to ask them to stop walking into shot! These chefs eh!

Back at mine we then built the Croquembouche, which you’ll recognise when you watch the show as the tower of sweet delights! I hope I look calm making it…what you can’t see is my kitchen helper Lisa nervously watching just out of shot, as she knew that if I messed it up it would be four hours before we hade all the ingredients together again. Now I have some idea know circus performers must feel working without a net, luckily I got it off the mould without mishap. It tasted delicious too! Not a pudding for those without nerves of steel – or at least nerves of spun sugar!

Fish feast

A life on the ocean wave! Not again for cameraman Alex who was looking decidedly green by the time we rolled back to port. We went fishing for sea bass with my mate Rick. “We” being me, Rick, my neighbour Terry and sous chef Chris. Apparently we picked the worst tide of the year to go line fishing, but we had to get it done before we could shoot the cooking sequence at my place. In fact we didn’t catch a sea bass…only a few mackerel, but we got lucky with the locals who came alongside and gave us some lobster which I cooked up on board – about as fresh as you can get it, though Alex didn’t seem to want any! Odd that. He seemed to be examining the sea, staring down into the water over the side of the boat between takes. Perhaps he was helpfully searching for the elusive bass?

In the end I had to buy it for the main course in the show instead but we had a good day out. The execs from the Channel were down for the day to see how we were getting on (and get out of the office for some decent food!) and so inevitably someone got the measurements wrong for the shortbread, which on Take One ended up looking more like a section of brownish wetland than a biscuit. Take two was fine though so we got finished on time. It was a good day and I think Alex appreciated the fact that my kitchen floor never rolls or pitches!

Lamb feast

We've just finished filming the first of the cooking sequences in my new kitchen at home and the place is slowly returning to normal, though I seem to have acquired a blue overcoat, a packet of "instant stardust" (!) and a huge pile of used batteries (need to workout how to dispose of those) while my dog Fudge is delighted to have his old favourite corner back by the door.

The filming was a mixed blessing for him chance of scraps of food from gullible newcomers, but his routine and kingdom taken over by strangers setting up lights and cameras! He also seemed to have explored a particularly smelly hole in the garden somewhere during the week too which had the crew looking suspiciously at each other until they realised who the culprit was. Pippa my PA has since hosed him down! He's almost fragrant! The crew had their eye on the lamb dish we were finishing off just before we stopped for lunch but someone turned their back in the kitchen and Fudge had that away too. My new recipe must be good 'cos he got outside with it in about 45 seconds! Now the team have taken all the footage away to edit it for the transmission just before Christmas. I’ll miss them, but not I think as much as Fudge will! No more surprise scraps, just regular meals for him.

Pork feast

Off to Greenfield Farm, my mate Martin Martindale's place, to source some meat for this episode in celebration of British pork. He has been breeding pigs for years and produces some of the very best meat in the UK, and he lives just down the road too! Filming days can be great fun if everyone gets on and things go well, but what really gets everyone working hard is an impromptu mega snack at 11.00! Martin went into action and put together a sort of tasting menu "Pork Highlights" barbecue of sausages, hogs head and shoulder of pork. After that our feet hardly touched the ground! He even produced a salad for our one veggie. There is always at least one veggie on any production team and I still dream of the day I convert one of them to the joys of meat eating, but I have to admit that cooking a pigs head is probably not a great place to start this process!

The cooking of the brawn from the pigs head went well as did the apple pie when we stopped for the day – it vanished in seconds -you'd think none of us had had so much as a bite a Martins Farm! I love these really British puddings and remember my Mum’s Apple pie from my childhood, but now that I’m grown up I am in charge of the custard portion control too. So the day went well. The dog Fudge had a treat of Pigs ears – well after all what can you make out of pigs ears? I roasted them for 30 minutes at 200 degrees for him. And my dream of turning a veggie – sadly when I last heard, Production Manager Catherine is still just having salad with her salad. Maybe next time.