Long time no meal planning. Actually that's not true. I have been meal planning for a long time for this special week. My parents are spending the Christmas with us this year, so weeks ago already I started to jot down ideas and particularly successful recipes that I thought my parents would enjoy. But it's really only in the last couple of days that my plan has really come together.

I have detailed plans for each main meal including desserts which I'm not that great at, and then some ideas around breakfasts and evening snacks. I'm pretty happy with my excel sheet. There is no major event in my life that doesn't include an excel spreadsheet. For my our wedding there was a monster of an excel workbook with probably 15 sheets or more detailing every single thing that was to happen on the day apart from the bit where my friend gets up to lead a bit of a surprise drinking song sing-along with a song about a Russian General Nikolai Bobrikov who had become a very hated man in Finland towards the tightening Russian oppression in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was eventually murdered by a Finnish government official, a nobleman and pro-independence activist Eugen Schauman, who subsequently became a national hero in Finland. The song goes:

The Russki is dead
his coffin is red
who the fuck knows if he's really dead.

Go to hell. Yes!
Go to hell,
Now the Russki goes to Hell.

Eloquent, no?

Excel or no excel, I know things will move around a little and some meals might be skipped completely if we are out and about. Having this plan in place has allowed me to prep things that can be done in advance and also helped in making sure everything was covered in the shopping list.

My menu is a combination of some British food, some of my trusted best recipes and some traditional Finnish Christmas foods, so that it really feels like Christmas.


Monday

We picked mum and dad up from the airport quite late last night, so I had planned a light supper. I popped open a bottle of sparkling wine and we toasted Christmas with my awesome Bouillabaisse, rouille and warm buttery thyme and garlic bread. Apparently the best fish soup that my parents have ever eaten. Better than my sister's Bouillabaisse then?

I had planned a dessert of cherry bundt cake, spiced Finnish Christmas biscuits and tea, but everyone was too full, so the cherry cake will wait for a better day. Dad and husband managed a biscuit each husband complaining that they looked like penises. It's a candle quit clearly.

Traditional Finnish spiced penis biscuits

Tuesday

I have planned a lunch of Marcus Wareing's recipe from this year's MasterChef of steamed plaice with white wine and mushroom sauce, but I suspect we will have lunch out and the plaice will go in the freezer for later.

Husband's kids are coming so we'll have a big dinner: Persian spiced lamb shanks, saffron rice, roast potatoes, mast-o khiar, Shirazi salad and flatbread.

For dessert it might be the cherry cake with some fresh berries and cream. Or there is also a spiced banana cake and custard.

Wednesday
Wednesday lunchtime we'll be out and about and will probably stop in a pub for lunch. Dinner will be my Greek inspired lemony chicken with orzo, rice, thyme, oregano and kefalotiri cheese served with a Santorini salad.

Dessert is a tropical fruit salad with coconut cream.

Thursday - Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve is the big day in the Finnish Christmas. Traditionally we eat an early light lunch of warm rice pudding and plum soup, a savoury snack of some sort - I have feta and spinach filo triangles, and then we finish it off with Finnish Christmas pastries with plum preserve and glögi (glögg), I will make mine from cranberry juice and might slip in a sneaky dash of vodka.

For dinner I will put together a big feast with lots of fish, meats, salads and oven baked vegetable dishes. I have a gravadlax according to my Dad's recipe in the freezer, ready to be taken out 24 hours before for perfect curing, I have game pate, smoked reindeer and an orange and honey roast ham, I will make a smoked salmon mousse, there's pickled herring, smoked salmon and sour cream and roe. I will make a beetroot and stilton salad and a traditional Finnish mushroom salad. There will be a cheese platter, traditional Finnish potato and swede bakes and a massive smoked leg of lamb that my parents brought from Finland. I think we need to invite the neighbours to help.

Oh and dessert will be cranberry soup with cream.

Friday - Christmas Day

Christmas lunch will be much the same as Christmas Eve dinner, partly because most of the food from the previous day will still be there uneaten. I will also do a reindeer topside roast with red wine sauce. Plum is a traditional Finnish Christmas fruit, so pudding will be a mixture of cream and quark and plum preserve.

If we manage anything in the evening it will probably be a savoury tart and salad.

Saturday

Boxing day will see a bit of a departure from the Christmas foods. I will probably collate some cold meats and fish dishes for starters, but the main will be my Provencal duck legs with puy lentils and provencal salad with Creme brule for dessert.

Evening meal will be a light chicken Caesar salad with bruschetta and lemon syllabub.

Sunday

Mum and Dad will be flying out Sunday evening, but we will have enough time for a proper lovely lunch. I might do the steamed plaice if we don't get to eat it on Tuesday, or slightly smoked salmon fillets baked and served with a fresh sour cream and dill sauce.

A Finnish Christmas table traditionally has been crowned by several different kinds of bakes (casseroles in US English) depending on where in Finland we are talking about. There are regional differences and some may have fallen on the wayside and now these three remain: carrot, swede and potato. But the greatest of these is potato.

The smelliest is the swede.

And the one no one cares either way about is the carrot bake. It's like the Lady Edith of Christmas bakes, a thoroughly uninteresting character with uninteresting suitors, who go missing without no one giving a damn. Potato is obviously the shiny, pretty and lovable Lady Sybil and swede is Lady Mary who's got a definite nasty whiff about her, but who you couldn't have Downton Abbey without.

The dish is called sweetened potato bake. Potatoes are first boiled and then mashed. Then they are sweetened in the oven. You mix in a little bit of plain flour, cover the pan and put it in the oven. Then the magical Christmas oven fairies turn the mash into a shiny golden sweet gorgeousness. Or maybe it's the enzyme amylase in the flour that reacts with the starch of the potato. Either or.

You can use golden syrup for added sweetness if the natural process won't quite do it. The temperature is key, if your oven is unreliable and the temperature is wrong the sweetening won't happen, you need to keep it above 55C and below 75C at all times. But even then sometimes the potatoes are just recalcitrant, so there is no shame in a squirt of syrup.

The bake is enjoyed hot fresh from the oven with different types of fish like gravadlax of course, hot smoked salmon, gravad whitefish, pickled herring and baltic herring. And it's not all fish, there is always also a massive ham, which is salted in brine for several days and then baked overnight in low heat until "overdone". Then it's dressed with mustard and whole cloves and baked until nicely browned on the outside.

This potato bake takes all day, the potato mash requires several hours of "sweetening" in the oven. Before you season it and bake it for several hours. Little active prep time, but lots of hanging around the oven and drinking mulled wine singing carols time.

Finnish sweetened potato bake (will make a lot - I made half a portion)

2 1/2 kg potatoes (floury: King Edward or Maris Piper)
1/3 cup plain flour
2 cups milk
Salt
1 tsp nutmeg
3-4 tbsp golden syrup
Butter

Peel and wash potatoes (the most traditional recipes recommend boiling them unpeeled and then peeling them hot, but that's really such a pain that I can't be bothered, if you want to do it, go for it and good luck to you and your thumb). Boil the potatoes in unsalted water until well done. Drain the potatoes preserving the water and mash the potatoes.

Cool the mash until it's little warmer than lukewarm (about 60C). Add about half a cup or a bit more of the preserved cooking water and mix.

The mask should be 55-75C, otherwise the sweetening won't happen, so make sure you cool it down to right temperature and that you oven is between 55 and 75C, ideally around 60C. You can also do this bit in a warm water bath, but I don't know how you would control the temperature so I always do it in the oven.

Once you think your mash is the right temperature mix in half of the flour. Cover the pan and place in the 60C oven.  After half an hour mix in the rest of the flour and leave in the oven for minimum 4-5 hours, but the sweetening process can take up to 8 hours. You don't want to disturb the potatoes a lot during this time. The potatoes are ready when the mash has loosened and become shiny and sweet.

When you are happy with the potato mix add enough milk to make a smooth loose porridge-like mix. It should be thinner than porridge but thicker than soup. Add the nutmeg and season with salt. If it is not sweet enough add some syrup.

Butter one or more baking dishes and fill each a little more than half way with the potato mix. The potato will bubble while baking, so it's important not to overfill. Add a couple of knobs of butter on top.

(If you want to serve the bakes later, you can refrigerate or freeze them at this stage and do the final baking just before you want to serve them.)

Bake in 150C for 2 hours and serve hot.

Baking salmon with a sour cream topping is quite a traditional everyday way of cooking salmon in Finland. We like our sour cream, we call it Smetana. It's one of the few good things that has come to us across our eastern border. No, just kidding, although miraculously can't think of anything just now. Other than that the Finnish food culture is indeed very interesting, because we have all the western Scandinavian influences as well as the Eastern European touches on top of our original Finnish cuisine. We love smetana with fish roe and pretty much anything fishy and many a soup and sauce is improved by an added blob of Smetana.

This was our Saturday dinner with the kids last week. I often opt for meat, because I think kids like that more, even though they have been pretty good with salmon. But this time traumatised by the Friday night meat fest at my company Christmas do (I don't know why he chose the turkey and pigs in blankets etc. when there was also fish on the menu) husband specifically asked for fish, so I thought I'd make this juicy version.

If you want to go all fancy-pants, you can do the same with wild Atlantic salmon and crayfish tails. Not long ago I did exactly that inspired by the crayfish that I found on the fish counter. I asked for a whole side of gorgeous, bright orange wild Atlantic salmon. As the fishmonger weighed it on the scales he mentioned the price which was quite a lot. I had read the wrong label with less than half the kg price.

At that point I should have said "oh dear, that's a bit expensive, how about that perfectly fine looking piece of farmed Norwegian salmon, how much would that be". That would have been completely reasonable and the fishmonger probably would not have laughed at me or pointed at me with his fish scaly finger shouting to all other customers: "look at this one - can't even afford to buy a piece of fish - should have gone to Lidl".

Instead I just smiled slightly stiffly and took the package without a flinch pretending I routinely buy stupidly expensive food and wished the stupid greedy monger a nice day. It's the same with the hairdresser, sorry, stylist, you can never tell her that she has completely fucked up your hair and happiness for the next 4 months, you thank her smiling sycophantically in your horrible 3-year-old-boy-hair, buy some stupidly priced heat protection spray you're never going to use and leave the salon to run into the dressing room of the first women's clothing store (in my case it's the Covent Garden Next) and burst into tears while trying to stretch your hair to cover your forehead, which in my case is a long distance.

So my advice regarding the fish (for hair I have nothing), is to do this with a normal lovely fresh salmon and prawns. It's just as lovely unless it's a special event and you want to impress. You can even skip the prawns, but they make it a bit more interesting.

Salmon topped with sour cream and prawns

1 side (750g-1kg) of Scottish, Norwegian or Atlantic salmon (or appropriate amount of fillets)
Bunch of fresh dill
1 lemon
Salt
Lemon pepper
1 pot (170ml) sour cream
1/4 cup single / double cream
 200g prawns (or crayfish)

If you can, season the salmon a few hours before cooking with salt and lemon pepper, a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh dill and the zest and juice of half a lemon. Let it sit in the fridge for maximum flavour.

When ready to cook heat the oven to 190C. Mix the sour cream and cream, season with salt and lemon pepper, zest and juice of half the lemon and a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh dill. I just thought of this, a spoonful of runny honey might work really nicely here, Spread about half of the sour cream mix on the fish. Mix the prawns with the rest of the sour cream mix and keep for later.

Place the salmon in the oven and cook for about 20-30 min (depending on thickness of your salmon) until the fish is almost done. Insert a knife into the thickest part of the fish to check doneness. I like my salmon pretty well done but not overcooked, so I will cook it until it flakes and has just turned pink. Some people like it a bit underdone in the middle and leave it slightly orange.

So about 5 minutes before your salmon is perfectly done to your liking take it out and spread the rest of the sour cream and prawns on top. Cook until the prawns have just turned pink. Garnish with fresh dill and lemon segments serve immediately with potatoes or rice and salad.

I've been catching up on MasterChef: The Professionals on BBC iPlayer. I'm loving it as always. I'm not sure why there are so few women though. Is it all a huge misogynistic conspiracy or are women just not entering or crap cooks or what! I was routing for the only remaining woman, the pretty lady chef Joey, whose food is always so beautiful and colourful and makes you happy just looking at the plate. Which is all we can do anyway, but by the sounds of it it also tasted great. But not great enough apparently as she was booted out tonight.

I like some of the younger guys with facial hair, there's like at least three identical ones there. They clearly seem to have some talent. There were also a couple of guys with holes in their ears big enough to stick cucumbers through, but they're gone now.

I think the skills tests have been a great way to learn to do some every day basics. Like butchering a rabbit or stuffing a pig's trotter. WHO EATS PIG'S TROTTERS? No but seriously, great tips for filleting fish (from the head not tail!), making sauces, classic desserts etc. It's also always funny when the three judges make faces at the poor contestants when they do things that clearly are unthinkable on planet Chef like try to glue their ravioli with water instead of egg, poach meringue quenelles in custard instead of milk or turn their back on the salamander. Never turn your back on a salamander. I never even knew what a salamander was until this series (apart from the kind that burnt holes in Ron Weasley's trousers). I'm just the kind of cook to definitely turn my back on a salamander and burn me toast. So many important things I'm learning, And you don't make a sabayon for ice-cream.

Also great tip: next time you cook for Britain's top chefs, don't make them eat lobster intestines.

In one of the episodes Marcus Wareing's skills test was filleting a plaice, steaming it and making a creamy mushroom and white wine sauce for it. I thought it looked like it would taste fantastic and might be an elegant meal to serve some elegant guests. I'm not great with sauces, so thought would be good to add a simple but delicious sauce to my repertoire.

So I decided to try this with the guidance of lovely Marcus. I didn't happen to have a whole plaice in my fridge but I had some ready filleted bream (although I can fillet a bream, starting from head not tail obviously) which I thought would do just as well.

So into a pan I threw some fish stock and aromatics. I used this broth both for steaming the fish and for the sauce.

For the sauce I chopped a couple of shallots and some button mushrooms, then added a good splash of white wine, stock and cream. I checked the seasoning and it didn't need any extra salt.

For the bream, I seasoned the fillets lightly with salt and pepper (although Marcus didn't seem to season his, but sometimes maybe I just know things) and just grated a tiny bit of lime zest on the them. Then I folded them into nice parcels and placed in the steamer (in my case not a pretty bamboo steamer but a sieve over a pan with the boiling stock covered with a lid).

The fish took probably about 5 minutes to cook. It's easy to see, just take it off the heat as soon as it has just turned from translucent to white and flakes easily. Or if you have Marcus's magic fingers you just touch the fish and you'll know).

The sauce was gorgeous with great mushroom taste and the fish was cooked just right. Husband was a bit suspicious as I gave him his white fish pieces from the sieve. They look a bit bland but once covered in the creamy sauce he got the point and loved the dish.

I served it with a fresh salad and some completely tasteless gnocchi - my first attempt at made from scratch gnocchi which were also unbelievably ugly.

Marcus Wareing's steamed fish with mushroom, cream and white wine sauce (serves 4)

8 fish fillets (plaice, bream or bass)

2 cups fish stock
Fresh herbs and other aromatics
(Marcus used half a lemon, 2 bay leaves, sprig of thyme, shallot, lemongrass and fennel - I only had lemon, bay leaves, thyme and shallot, but threw in some fresh parsley and dill for good measure)

Sauce
Butter or oil
2 Shallots
Large handful (about 2/3 - 1 cup) chopped mushrooms
1/3 cup white wine
2/3 cup fish stock
1/3 cup cream
Handful of thinly sliced mushrooms
Fresh thyme

Fillet and season your fish and fold ready to steam. Bring the fish stock with the aromatics to boil. Place your fish in the steamer.

Chop the shallots and mushroom. Heat a knob of butter or tbsp of oil in a pan and add shallots and mushroom. Fry for a minute of two. Add the white wine, cook down a bit, add the fish stock from under the steamer, add the cream. Cook down a little. Sieve and discard the mushroom and onion. Return the sauce to pan and add thinly sliced mushroom and fresh thyme. Cook for a little while until mushrooms are done (add a splash of water if it's getting too thick). Check seasoning.

Once fish is cooked remove from steamer and plate. Spoon the sauce over the fish.

These Persian spiced lamb shanks are the best I have ever made. By a mile. And I have cooked some mean shanks. No, modesty is not my thing. At least I'm not taking any credit for this recipe, because it is not mine. But I did find it online, I suppose that's something. I googled "Persian spiced lamb shanks" because that was exactly what I wanted. And this recipe for Persian spiced lamb shanks magically came up on top. Thank you Google!

And I executed the recipe to perfection and I'm not just saying that myself, Husband's quite the shank man and he was in heaven. He must have said at least 5 times during the dinner what unbelievably great food it was and what a lucky man he was to have such a brilliant shank-cooking wife.

He's actually been sending me these really sweet messages now, probably fuelled by the shanks. In one a little animated couple sits on a picnic rug and the boy puts his arm around the girl and squeezes her lovingly. That's the power of a well-cooked shank for you!

I made these on Saturday when husbands kids were over and the kids were slightly embarrassed by husband's rapturous reaction "Dad you said that at least 5 times already" but they loved the shanks too. Got through two each, Together the four of us demolished 2 kg of meat / 6 shanks. Just saying in case you ever invite us for dinner, a little won't go a long way. Plus a fair amount of baghali polo (dill and lima bean rice), roast potatoes and mast-o-khiar cucumber yoghurt. Result!

I followed the original recipe pretty closely. It looked perfect and I had nothing much to add or change. I replaced fresh nutmeg with ground, left out the orange as had none, was a bit more generous than the original recipe with saffron, because I love saffron, and just converted the amounts to match my larger amount of meat. I bet you could add garlic and/or ginger, but I thought I'll trust the original recipe as there seems to be such depth and breadth of flavours already.

And oh boy was it awesome. It's not a difficult or cumbersome recipe either. Just the sauce with the rice would have been worth the effort. And the meat was fall-off-the-bone soft and gorgeous beyond words.

Can't wait to do it again. It made it's way straight onto my "Xmas week's magical menu for Mum and Dad" excel spreadsheet of the most epic dishes that I will be cooking for them as they visit us this Christmas.



Recipe and instructions by David Tanis at NY Times:

Persian spiced lamb shanks

4 lamb shanks (ask for the hind shanks), about 4 1/2 to 5 pounds
Salt
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1 teaspoon ground dried rosebuds, optional
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon turmeric
Vegetable oil
¼ teaspoon crumbled saffron
Juice of 2 limes, about 4 tablespoons
3 teaspoons rosewater, available from Middle Eastern grocery shops
1 large onion, roughly chopped
½ teaspoon ground dried lime, or the zest of 1 fresh lime
Zest of 1 orange, plus 1 tablespoon more for garnish
A few thyme sprigs
2 fresh bay leaves
6 cups hot chicken broth or water
2 tablespoons roughly chopped parsley, for garnish
2 tablespoons roughly chopped mint or dill, for garnish

Trim any excess fat from lamb shanks and season generously with salt. Mix together the cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, rosebuds (if using), black pepper and turmeric. Sprinkle evenly over shanks and rub into meat. Let sit at room temperature at least an hour, or wrap and refrigerate overnight, then bring to room temperature.

Place a Dutch oven or deep, heavy pot over medium-high heat and add oil to a depth of 1/2 inch. When oil is hot, add 2 lamb shanks and fry until nicely browned on all sides, about 5 minutes. Remove and set aside, then brown the 2 remaining shanks.

Meanwhile, put saffron in a small bowl with lime juice, 2 teaspoons rosewater and 1/2 cup warm water. Let steep for 10 minutes. Heat oven to 350 degrees.

Carefully remove all but 2 tablespoons oil from Dutch oven. Add chopped onion and cook over medium heat until softened and lightly colored, 8 to 10 minutes. Season onion with salt, then add lime zest, orange zest, thyme sprigs and bay leaves. Stir in saffron mixture. Lay in the lamb shanks and add the broth. Bring to a boil, then turn off heat and cover pot.

Transfer pot to oven and bake for about 1 1/2 hours, covered, until meat is tender when probed and beginning to fall from the bone. Remove lamb shanks to a deep serving dish and keep warm. Strain braising juices through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl, pressing with a wooden spoon to obtain all the liquid (discard thyme, bay leaves and onions). Skim fat, then taste and add salt if necessary. Add 1 more teaspoon rosewater, if desired. Reheat strained juices and pour over lamb shanks. Combine parsley, mint and reserved orange zest and sprinkle over top.

Use a large spoon to break the tender shank meat into large chunks. Serve in low, wide soup plates, giving each portion a spoonful of the juices. Accompany with steamed Basmati rice, lavash flatbread or a loaf of crusty French bread.

I think mallards are beautiful. The male mallard with its green and blue shiny bits that is. The poor lady mallard is a bit drab. But they look like wonderful mums calmly floating around with the tiny ducklings in a tight little cloud behind them.

There is something sympathetic about these birds although I read somewhere  about their mating habits. Not very sympathetic, but we will not delve into that. There's enough evil in the world without waterfowl turning all gangrapey. So I will forget I ever read that.