• 1 cup dried yellow split peas
• 5 cups water (plus 1/2 cup more later)
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 3 -5 garlic cloves
• 3/4 teaspoon cumin seed
• 3/4 teaspoon mustard seeds
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon salt (or more to taste)
• black pepper
• crushed red pepper flakes

Read more: http://www.food.com/recipe/yellow-split-pea-dal-64224#ixzz1jdxQ74RV

This Jamie Oliver recipe from Jamie At Home has become a staple. It’s a brilliant dish which uses a cheap cut of pork to create a large, delicious pot of goulash with which you can either feed a lot of people all at once, or freeze in portions to pull out all through the winter.

Ingredients

• 2kg pork shoulder off the bone, in one piece, skin off, fat left on
• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• olive oil
• 2 red onions, peeled and finely sliced
• 2 fresh red chillies, deseeded and finely chopped
• 2 generously heaped tablespoons mild smoked paprika, plus a little extra for serving
• 2 teaspoons ground caraway seeds
• a small bunch of fresh marjoram or oregano, leaves picked
• 5 peppers (use a mixture of colours)
• 1 x 280g jar of grilled peppers, drained, peeled and chopped
• 1 x 400g tin of good-quality plum tomatoes
• 4 tablespoons red wine vinegar
• 400g basmati or long-grain rice, washed
• 1 x 142ml pot of soured cream
• zest of 1 lemon
• a small bunch of fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/gas 4. Get yourself a deep, ovenproof stew pot with a lid that will fit your meat and other ingredients in snugly, and heat it on the hob. Score the fat on the pork in a criss-cross pattern all the way through to the meat, then season generously with salt and pepper. Pour a good glug of olive oil into the pot and then add the pork, fat side down. Cook for about 15 minutes on a medium heat, to render out the fat, then remove the pork from the pot and put it to one side.

Add the onions, chilli, paprika, caraway seeds, marjoram or oregano and a good pinch of salt and pepper to the pot. Turn the heat down and gently cook the onions for 10 minutes, then add the sliced peppers, the grilled peppers and the tomatoes. Put the pork back into the pot, give everything a little shake, then pour in enough water to just cover the meat. Add the vinegar – this will give it a nice little twang. Bring to the boil, put the lid on top, then place in the preheated oven for 3 hours.

You’ll know when the meat is cooked as it will be tender and sticky, and it will break up easily when pulled apart with two forks. If it’s not quite there yet, put the pot back into the oven and just be patient for a little longer!

When the meat is nearly ready, cook the rice in salted, boiling water for 10 minutes until it’s just undercooked, then drain in a colander, reserving some of the cooking water and pouring it back into the pan. Place the colander over the pan on a low heat and put a lid on. Leave to steam dry and cook through for 10 minutes – this will make the rice lovely and fluffy.

Stir the sour cream, lemon zest and most of the parsley together in a little bowl. When the meat is done, take the pot out of the oven and taste the goulash. You’re after a balance of sweetness from the peppers and spiciness from the caraway seeds. Tear or break the meat up and serve the goulash in a big dish or bowl, with a bowl of your steaming rice and your flavoured soured cream. Sprinkle with the rest of the chopped parsley and tuck in!

From jamieoliver.com

Just blitz all this lot up in a food processor, really. Taste it, and then add more water, oil, lemon or salt or whatever you think it needs.

• 400g drained tinned chick peas
• 1 tsp sea salt
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 3 garlic cloves, peeled
• 3 tbsp tahini (sesame seed paste)
• 50ml lemon juice
• 50ml water
• 1 tsp Sichuan pepper blitzed with fresh corriander leaves

About Sichuan pepper (or Szechuan pepper)

Sichuan pepper (or Szechuan pepper) is the outer pod of the tiny fruit of a number of species in the genus Zanthoxylum (most commonly Z. piperitum, Z. simulans, and Z. schinifolium), widely grown and consumed in Asia as a spice. Despite the name, it is not related to black pepper or to chili peppers. It is widely used in the cuisine of Sichuan, China, from which it takes its name, as well as Tibetan, Bhutanese, Nepalese, Japanese, Konkani, and Toba Batak cuisines, among others.

The simple pleasures of Come Dine With Me may leave you feeling a bit sick, but they taste alright going down

How best to pay homage to Come Dine With Me? Any tribute to the programme worth its Maldon sea salt would have to reach just a little too far, mess up spectacularly and expose its creator to the sniggering of his peers. In other words, the very stuff of Comment is free.

All that will come in a bit, I promise – but before we get to the high-falutin’ stuff, the intimidating Escargots de Bourgogne if you will, let’s cover some of the basics.

Because Dine doesn’t just provide simple pleasures – it bombards you with them. Picture the scene of the programme’s conception: a TV production office called Late Capitalist Entertainment Inc, a bunch of hipsters lolling around in their finest geography-teacher tailoring.

What, asks one 20-something from the depths of his parka, genre shall we make this show? Reality or gameshow, cooking or property? I know, says another Cambridge graduate, while earnestly fingering the suede on his Clarks shoes, why not have bits of all of them?

So was born a programme that distills all the most entertaining bits of each format, and discards all the ponderousness. There are scenes of cooking, but shot with an eye for mishap rather than instruction. You get to nose around different houses, but without the pretence of being taught about DIY. At only a grand (in £20 notes fanned around a dinner plate, because presentation obviously counts), the prize would hardly lift Chris Tarrant’s eyebrows. The result is a series of cheap sugar-highs – a programme that may leave you feeling a bit sick afterwards but, hey, it tasted alright going down.

And then there are the contestants. Some are bemusingly odd, but others you wouldn’t willingly talk to if your house was on fire and they were manning the 999 call centre.

Seared on my memory is the episode where Johnny, an Eddie Jordan lookalike, snogs a grandmother in front of the other guests, gropes her, then settles back to praise her “juicy lips”. What was his game? What was she thinking? Why did no one call the police? Readers, I have no answers – just a YouTube clip that you really don’t want to watch.

That feeling of queasiness you can detect above is one the producers encourage. The programme takes that trick from The Office of holding a shot for just a beat after something funny has been said, and mixes it with a sense of slapstick.

In Leicester, a menu from “glamorous ex-dancer” Ria arrives promising a “Parisian Surprise”. What can she mean? “Something French, I would think,” says Colin. This man claims to be a management consultant. The camera dwells on him in wonder, while the reliably acid narrator Dave Lamb breaks in with “Well done, Einstein“. To the programme-makers’ evident delight the surprise turns out to be a cancan routine performed in Ria’s back garden.

Interviewed by this paper last year, Lamb suggested that Dine’s success lay with its contestants – “the gap between who they are and who they think they are“. His phrase neatly sums up the show’s bigger theme. It’s there in the very title with its allusions to Rat Pack glamour, rather than nuclearised meat served up in Doncaster. It’s there in the gulf between the hosts’ spick-and-span houses and their hidden bottles of self-tanning lotion.

And most of all, it shines out of the contestants themselves. In Preston, Valerie trills to the camera: “My friends think it’s pretty wonderful to come round my house for dinner … because my friends adore me.” Dave Lamb heckles: “Lucky old friends“.

The viewers laugh along with Dave, of course. But the truth is we’ve all got more in common with Valerie than we’d like.

With its museums, castle and nearby coast, there are plenty of reasons to visit Lancaster. But where to eat in this historic county capital? Tony Naylor picks the city’s 10 best budget restaurants

• Interactive map: Britain’s best budget restaurants

White Cross

A somewhat ugly pub, in a fine canalside location, the White Cross is known for its homemade all-day food and its 14 real ales. Portions are extraordinarily generous. For £5, I got a slice of dense, rough-cut, seriously piggy pork pie the size of my outstretched hand and as deep as my index finger, alongside a pile of decent, fluffy skin-on chips. Less could be more, in this case, as the pie certainly didn’t need its herb-stuffing topping and the accompanying pot of zingy orange-and-raisin chutney. But if you’re on a budget and need to fill up, the White Cross should be your number one destination.

The wider menu takes in deli boards, sandwiches and sausages in various states (with mash, casseroled etc) and a fantastic-sounding steak and ale pie that uses beer from the Tirril brewery, in Appleby in Westmorland. Steaks apart, all the dishes are under £10. You’ll find Tirril’s Old Faithful on the bar, alongside regional beers from the likes of Bowland and Lytham breweries. If White Cross ripped out its red-brick bar and its dated patterned carpets – in fact, had a general refurb – it would be a very good pub indeed.
• Snacks and sandwiches from £4, mains from £5. Quarry Road, 01524 33999, thewhitecross.co.uk

The Music Room

A spin-off from award-winning local coffee roaster J Atkinson & Co, the Music Room is where owner Ian Steel and his son Maidment put their beans into action across a menu of next-level espresso, pour-over filter and cafetière drinks (coffees from £1.50). The knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff will happily talk you through blends, tastes and extraction methods, without blinding you with science, and the finished drinks could hold their own with anything produced in London’s “third wave” coffee bars.

If you feel the need to flannel convincingly about your brew, the walls are helpfully lined with tutorial posters which walk the novice through the gamut of coffee aromas, from, erm, roast beef to garden peas. The Music Room also sells a small selection of brilliant cakes by talented local Debbie Kaye, including root vegetable and fig cake or pear and plum Bakewell. The Music Room itself is an attention-grabber: the interior has been cleanly decluttered by the Steels, but retains its three-storey Victorian elaborate facade. It makes for an almost Berlin-ish contrast with the neighbouring graffiti and urban decay.
• Cakes from £2.40. Sun Street, 01524 65470, themusicroomcafe.com

The Sun

This handsome city centre inn (all exposed stone, wooden beams and polished rusticity), serves good food all day. In particular, its sharing deli boards of local cheeses, charcuterie and items from the excellent Port of Lancaster Smokehouse are a boon for the picky budget traveller (£8-£16). Its evening menu includes a few other dishes, such as fish and chips or the Sun’s own sausage and mash, which come in under £10, but, if you’re watching the pennies, the daytime menus offer greater choice. The Sun’s bar is a cosy bolthole at breakfast (until 10.30am weekdays). The dimmed lighting, relaxed friendly staff and the background hum of consensual jazz standards will ease you gently into the day.

Prices might seem a shade high – for instance, £8 for eggs Benedict – but portions are huge, quality good and everyone gets toast and Wilkinson’s jams thrown in. Finish the Sun’s small hillock of smoked salmon, sunny scrambled eggs and fresh Scottish pancakes (£6), and it will set you up for hours of sightseeing and history. Incidentally, the Sun is owned by the dynamic Lancaster Brewery, so the beer choice is both wide (10 real-ale hand-pumps) and interesting.
• Breakfast and lunch dishes from £3.50, evening mains from £8.50. 63-65 Church Street, 01524 66006, thesunhotelandbar.co.uk

Hodgson’s

Nigel and Linda Hodgson’s chippy was named the nation’s best in 2006. Clearly they are maintaining a fearsome standard. The evidence is there in the queue snaking out of the door on a Friday lunchtime, and on the plate. The beef dripping-versus-vegetable oil argument is not one we have space to revisit here, but when you’re using vegetable oil, as the Hodgson’s do, and your batter is good and your oil supremely hot, it is possible to produce a uniquely clean and light plate of fish and chips. Specifically, the batter should form a shell within which the fish should steam, not fry.

Even among those veg-oil-powered chippies which get it right, Hodgson’s haddock and chips is a cut above. Its batter is almost tempura-thin, the interior a crisp honeycomb. There was no grease, no stray patches of thickened, gloopy batter, and it had a pronounced seasoned, savoury flavour. It was as perfect a fish batter as I have ever eaten. The fish itself fell apart in meaty, pearly flakes, the chips were, likewise, crisp, rustling beauties of an almost buttery softness within. Hodgson’s is a few minutes’ walk from the city-centre, but well worth the detour.
• Fish and chips from £3.95. 96 Prospect Street, 01524 67763, hodgsonschippy.com

Pizza Margherita

Opened more than 30 years ago by Wendy Allen, sister of Pizza Express founder, Peter Boizot, Margherita is a portal through which you can step back in time, when the Pizza Express aesthetic (that bistro-brasserie mishmash of big mirrors, bigger windows, indoor shrubbery, Athena art prints and cast-iron, marble-topped cafe tables) was still the definition of go-getting metropolitan sophistication. That is not a criticism, incidentally. That look is a bit of a classic, in its way, and far superior to the primary-coloured plasticity that a lot of high-street restaurants now favour.

PM’s pizzas are, similarly, almost indistinguishable from the better ones you might have eaten at Pizza Express. I’d have preferred more (any, in fact) char on the base, but the dough has that airy lightness and slight residual sweetness that indicate that it’s fresh and has been properly worked. The toppings are sound: thin slivers of nicely vinegary preserved artichoke, decent ham, assertive anchovies. It is a perfectly serviceable pizza. Takeaway available.
• Small pizzas from £4.85, regular from £6.95. 2 Moor Lane, 01524 36333, pizza-margherita.co.uk

Whale Tail

In a little courtyard off Penny Street, upstairs from not-for-profit wholefood co-op Single Step, this busy vegetarian and vegan cafe is well-known for its unusually good meat-free cooking. Its falafel (incredibly light and delicate, encased in perfectly crisp shells, beautifully spiced and seasoned, long on savoury flavour) live up to the billing, served with a fresh minty tzatziki, so-so standard pitta and salad. Elsewhere, that day’s specials included an interesting-sounding creamy potato, smoked cheese, apple and basil bake, a chunky vegetable and barley broth, and several mouth-watering puddings, such as apple and sultana crumble, and chocolate and almond torte.

There is also a standard menu of salads, jacket potatoes and filled organic wholemeal rolls. The space, a fairly utilitarian cafe prettified with kitschy, crafty art and objects, has a pleasant easy-going atmosphere. If you want to expand your horizons, and not just your waistline, there is the obligatory notice board at the entrance, advertising everything from Pilates and poetry to pottery classes.
• Dishes from £2.95. 78a Penny Street, 01524 845133, whaletailcafe.co.uk

The Sultan Food Cour

This big airy basement underneath the Sultan of Lancaster restaurant is an unusual mix of daytime canteen, art and crafts gallery and delicatessen. The deli’s range is limited and the stock is a rather random mixture of global foods. The cafe menu, however, is more interesting. It is fairly short but roves far and wide from Lancashire cheese sandwiches to Middle Eastern tabbouleh and falafel.

A core of biryanis, grilled meat wraps and snacks such as samosas and pakoras are also available as part of sharing platters, with dishes like Bombay potatoes, chicken tikka masala and little patra parcels. A trio of lamb, chicken and vegetable samosas were, the rather tokenistic salad aside, great value at £3.75, all bursting with flavoursome ground meat and bright-eyed vegetables, all breezily seasoned with fresh herbs and spices. The service is warm and chatty, incidentally, as it seems to be across the whole of Lancaster.
• Snacks from £2.95, meals from £3.95. Brock Street, 01524 849494, sultanoflancaster.com

Soupanova

No prizes for guessing the main attraction here. Alison Barker’s venue – part 1950s tiled coffee bar, part boho diner – is Lancaster’s soup bar du jour, dispensing five homemade varieties each day to a hungry lunchtime crowd. Flavours range from a simple carrot and courgette to a fiery Malayan curried vegetable, all served, as appropriate, with black pepper, parmesan, croutons and breads from a variety of artisan bakers, including Lunesdale Bakery in Kirkby Lonsdale, a few miles outside Lancaster.

A sample medium pot of smoked bacon and vegetable soup (£2.50) was spot on: blitzed to a robust thickness, nicely seasoned, the vegetables accurately cooked, that soul-stirring smoky bacon flavour shining through. As I walked up Cheapside, it was just the thing to keep the winter winds at bay. Soupanova also sells sandwiches, salads, homemade cakes, tortilla and fresh smoothies.
• Soup from £2. 18 Church Street, 01524 841488

Mung Mee

While there are a number of sub-£10 dishes on this Thai restaurant’s evening menu, the budget traveller is best visiting for lunch, when two courses cost £7.99. Of the sampled dishes, homemade Thai-style sai grok sausages are interestingly fatty pork bangers bound with rice; the tom yam soup, while not the most refined version ever, delivers in all the key areas. It’s fiery and aromatic, each mouthful delivering an interplay of hot and sour, fishy and savoury flavours. After lunch, foodists should browse the aisles of Mung Mee’s east Asian supermarket next door, where you can pick up everything from canned pennywort drinks to Chinese salted duck eggs.
• Lunch, two courses, £7.99. 6A Chapel Street, 01524 64107, mungmee.co.uk

The Borough

A case of saving the best until last? Quite possibly. Located on a handsome Georgian square by the town hall, this pleasantly gussied-up gastropub serves honest, locally sourced food at remarkably low-prices, certainly in the daytime. Its two-course “school dinners” menu (£7.95), served Monday to Saturday, noon-6.30pm, is a bona fide bargain, the quality far superior to anything you will remember from school.

A plate of pork belly arrived atop a smooth, creamy pile of mash, with an apple sauce that sensibly dialled down the sweetness and a gravy that spoke volubly of wine, herbs and deglazed roasting pans. The pork itself came apart in thick, moist flavoursome strands. The only clanger was the crackling, one half of which was flabby and inedible. It was a bit sloppy of the kitchen to send that out but, even so, for the money, it was a very good plate of food. The bar has seven real ale pumps, including a Borough IPA brewed for the pub. A sample pint of Manchester brewery Marble’s Best (£3.20) was in superb condition – much spicier, sweeter and hoppier than the usual boring brown liquid passed off as best bitter. The staff are efficient and eager to please, too.
• Two-course daytime menu, £7.95, deli boards from £6.25. 3 Dalton Square, 01524 64170, theboroughlancaster.co.uk

Tony travelled from Manchester to Lancaster with First TransPennine Express (tpexpress.co.uk). For more information on things to see and do in and around Lancaster, visit citycoastcountryside.co.uk

Plus: Unloved towns, from Hammerfest to Nazareth; Shakespeare joins the bad rhymers

We know about the introduction of potatoes and tobacco to Europe, but who do we thank for the introduction of chocolate?

Although I’d love to say the Belgians, the answer is plainly and simply the Spanish. On Columbus’s third voyage to the New World in 1502 he captured a Maya trading canoe transporting cacao beans, among other produce. He may have known that the beans were treated as currency, but not that a drink was made out of them.

When the Spanish, under Cortéz, invaded the Yucatan peninsula and the Valley of Mexico around 1526, they soon realised the potential of the “black almonds”. At first disgusted by the frothy, dark beverage, the conquistadors started to appreciate it. It was a Spanish scientist called Francisco Hernandez who, in the late 16th century, first described a refreshing drink comprising ground cacao, ground sapote kernels, maize and other flavourings. 

The word chocolate is said to come from the marriage of the Mayan word for “hot” (chocol) and the Nahuatl word for “water” (atl). In 1544 the future Philip II of Spain received chocolate as a gift from a party of Kekchi Maya from Guatemala, led by Dominican monks; and as a commodity of trade, cacao beans began to reach Spain from 1585.

Michael Vanheste, Bettys Cookery School, Harrogate, N Yorks

What is the most unflattering description of a town in literature?

I love this, from William Cobbett’s Rural Rides: “All Middlesex is ugly, notwithstanding the millions upon millions which it is continually sucking up from the rest of the kingdom; and, though the Thames and its meadows now-and-then are seen from the road, the country is not less ugly from Richmond to Chertsey-bridge, through Twickenham, Hampton, Sunbury and Shepperton than it is elsewhere. The soil is a gravel at bottom with a black loam at top near the Thames; further back it is a sort of spewy gravel; and the buildings consist generally of tax-eaters’ showy tea-garden-like boxes, and of shabby dwellings of labouring people, who, in this part of the country look to be about half Saint Giles’s: dirty, and have every appearance of drinking gin” (St Giles was the notorious London slum shown in Hogarth’s Gin Lane).

Drahdiwaberl

I think it must be Bill Bryson again (N&Q, 7 December), this time from Neither Here Nor There, where he describes Hammerfest in northern Norway as “an agreeable enough town in a thank- you-God-for-not-making-me-live-here sort of way”.

Chris Green, Worthing

dIt must be John Betjeman’s Slough:

“Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough/It isn’t fit for humans now,/There isn’t grass to graze a cow/ Swarm over, Death!”

JonBerk

I don’t know if the questioner will count it as literature, but in the first chapter of the Gospel according to John, verse 46, Nathanael says to Philip, who has just told him that he has found the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote, and that he comes from Nazareth: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”. I don’t think even Chelmsford has had a put-down like that.

(Fr) Alec Mitchell, Manchester

Is Neil Sedaka’s “Oh Carol/I am but a fool/Darling I love you/Though you treat me cruel” the worst-ever rhyme in a popular song?

The immortals are not exempt:

Shakespeare’s “winter wind” and “nor so unkind” in As You Like It and Blake’s “hand or eye” and “symmetry” in Tyger Tyger.

Tom Wilson, Paisley

Talking of terrible rhymes, does any great poem have a bad rhyme to rival this from Yeats’s The Tower?

“The pride of the people that were

Bound neither to cause nor to State,

Neither to slaves that were spat on,

Nor to the tyrants that spat,

The people of Burke and of Grattan

That gave, though free to refuse …”

John Saunders, Oxford

Since turning 50, I’ve found that without a post-prandial nap I feel weary and cannot concentrate; but after as little as two minutes’ sleep I’m completely restored. What on earth happens in those two minutes?

Never mind a 4:47 system reboot (N&Q, 7 December), what’s the fix for total insomnia inability to shut down? I’ve tried the off button, esc, ctrl+alt+del, counting QWERTY sheep forwards and backwards, but still can’t crash that hyperactive brain. Where is the access hatch to my battery?

David Jarman, Glasgow

A two-minute nap is a sure way for me to wake up feeling grumpy and ready to take my place in angry Britain. I’m not a happy napper.

barnabasdoggie

Any answers?

In films and on TV locked doors and padlocks are opened by firing bullets at them. Is this feasible in real life?

John Burgess, Wokingham, Berks

Why do fingernails grow faster than toenails? Or is it just me?

PatrickLondon

Which poses the greater danger, snakes or ladders? I understand both cause many injuries and deaths each year.

Richard Sothcott, Brighton

• Post your questions and answers below or email nq@guardian.co.uk (please include name, address and phone number).

Last orders is looming. If you’re hoping to have Christmas delivered, is it all booked in yet?

There is a big-deal meal happening in 12 days’ time. What you eat depends on how you – or your hosts – choose to shop. And although it’s still many hours and other, probably better meals away, the options for the Christmas lunch shop are disappearing fast.

Since online food shopping became reliable (stifle your snorts if you’ve had Doritos substituted for Bordeaux), many people have come to rely on it. It’s nice to be able to test the quality of your veg by squeezing a tomato (not too hard!), but if you need loo roll, gin, foil and Celebrations as well as parsnips and poultry and you don’t want to fight with idiots to get the last reasonable specimens, having it delivered to your door is wise indeed.

If you are one of the people who thought about this a month ago, congratulations – and enjoy your Doritos. If not, what’s your plan? The major supermarkets, which tend to release online grocery delivery slots around three weeks before the festivities, with some giving first refusal to regular customers, are mostly sold out of van time.

Delivery on Friday 23 December, the in-demand day due to its proximity to the big one and the chance to nip out on Christmas Eve if you (or the supermarket) miss something, is a pipedream. Checking on Saturday for available slots for deliveries to our house near Manchester made me thank the little baby Jesus that we’re not hosting anything that demands more than tea and mince pies this year. Waitrose and Tesco’s best slots were the few remaining on 21 December, while Ocado and Sainsbury’s could only offer the day before. Only Asda could have done the Friday, and as far as I can see they don’t sell whole fresh turkeys. That’s a disadvantage.

Where “click and collect” services exist (they do the shopping, you go and fetch it) all the shops required us to drive past our huge local stores and on into unfamiliar territory for the pickup, which would feel slightly too much like buying stolen art in a layby. In theory I could actually go to the shops, but home-shopping “pickers” – as well as regular shoppers – clog up the aisles at our local superstore to the extent that a personal visit is a deeply frustrating experience, even at 7.30am.

Deadlines for local butchers and fishmongers might be long past (our butcher deliberately over-orders, then sells the extras to those who do the best begging face), but there are other ways to get your food roughly when you want it. Gourmet butchers Donald Russell deliver nationwide right up until Christmas Eve, although meat is delivered frozen so big roasting joints should be ordered by the 22 December for arrival on the 23rd to ensure they’re thoroughly defrosted (48 hours). On the micro level, Mark “Marky Market” White, who shops at Billingsgate and Smithfield markets for his London customers, is doing market runs daily between Tuesday 20 and Friday 23 December. At the last count, the latter was almost full for deliveries, but if you’re on his route, you might be lucky.

Northern Harvest, the veg box and food delivery company are doing all their deliveries, including turkeys, on 22 and 23 December; orders must be in by noon on the 14th. KellyBronze, they of the famous turkeys, are delivering on the 22nd and will close their order book appealingly late at 8am on Monday 19th. Abel & Cole deliver on different days depending on where you live; we’re a Monday and their Christmas schedule is a day later, so we’d get the veg box and associated goodies on the 20th, with last orders on the 16th. Our local Riverford is sold out of most turkeys and geese, but what they do have will be delivered from the 18th with shelf life up to the 27th. Daylesford Organics, whose last Christmas order is the 16th, do a surprisingly well-priced Christmas lunch box that they’ll deliver in one of two time slots on the 21st or 22nd. Have we missed any?

Of course, Christmas lunch isn’t the only festive feast. Hobby cooks like nothing better than an excuse for a “special” meal and a chance to crack the spine of their Christmas cookbook. Because some smaller suppliers close after Christmas, and New Year dinners demand luxurious ingredients and possibly ras-el-hanout, pretendy caviar or fresh tarragon, the 31 December food shop can be even more traumatic. How far is too far to go to collect a lobster? We drove 7 miles last year. Better book a delivery slot.

The MCS’s survey gave the Co-operative and Marks & Spencer a gold rating for sourcing and promoting sustainable fish

Confusing and meaningless labelling is undermining much of the positive work supermarkets are are doing to source and promote sustainable fish, according to a new survey, which claims some retailers show “a blatant disregard” to where their products come from.

The greenest policies also often apply only to own-brand seafood and fish – not everything sold in store, including tinned and frozen fish – according to the latest supermarket seafood survey from the Marine Conservation Society, published on Monday.

The research sees the Co-operative and Marks & Spencer tying for the top spot, a gold rating, marking continued success for the Co-op, hailed by the MCS for “good” labelling and for selling nothing from the MCS “fish to avoid” list – which includes skate, eel and bluefin tuna.

M&S has the most comprehensive seafood policy of all retailers covering all fish sold in store, not just its own brand. But the MCS notes its labelling policy is still falling short, and needs improving.

Sainsbury’s and Waitrose picked up silver, behind M&S and the Co-op. However, none of the other eight supermarkets which took part in the survey reached the bronze criteria, while some retailers refused to take part in the research at all.

Scoring reasonably well were Morrisons, Tesco and Iceland, but they all failed to meet the bronze criteria set by MCS, as many sell either too much fish from the charity’s Fish to Avoid list.

The MCS, fisheries officer, David Parker said: “The 2011 survey has thrown up both positives and negatives. Some supermarkets are really working on their seafood polices with a positive attitude towards improvement – although most policies disappointingly only refer to their own brands. Many supermarkets are working hard on their farmed and wild caught fish sourcing. However, labelling continues to be a stumbling block for almost all retailers.”

The MCS’s complaints about labelling echo the findings of other research by Which? and environmental law group Client Earth.

Channel 4′s Fish Fight campaign of this year – led by the food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – highlighted the issue of sustainability, prompting a significant increase in sales of “alternative” species of fish and seafood at the end of January.

The Co-operative Ethical Consumerism report – due to published this Thursday – will show that last year, sales of fish from sustainable sources grew by 16.3%, from £178m to £207m. That was twice the rate for total fish sales which increased 8.2% in the same period.

Globally, 85% of fish stocks are fully fished or overfished, while only eight out 47 fish stocks in UK waters are currently in a healthy state.

Innovation in the kitchen is a fine thing, but Christmas day is no time for for hesitation or deviation. It is a day for repetition

This week, a bunch of chefs including Michel Roux Jr and Marcus Wareing are baking 50 mince pies each for charity. You can bid for the chance to frisbee them at your family this Christmas. Or feed them to the dog. Depends on the chef.

Ashley Palmer-Watts is deep-frying his mince pies, and I must admit I jumped at the chance to see this particular piece of culinary shark jumping. At the Fat Duck Experimental Kitchen I watched as he dropped the ravioli-like pies into hot oil. This is going to be a disaster, I thought.

As it turned out, Palmer-Watts’ pies emerged from the fryer swollen and golden, crisp yet soft without, and with a filling that was sob-inducingly good. It tasted of mandarin. If you must interfere with classics, it seems deep frying is the way to go, but innovation in this field is rarely welcome.

Phil Howard’s ludicrous brioche mince swirls didn’t taste good enough to mitigate the fact that they were plainly not mince pies, while Eric Lanlard’s, while admittedly delicious, were closer to quiches than mince pies. The Guardian’s mince pie tasting panel were as conservative in their tastes as ever this year, punishing the likes of master baker Bertinet for his almondy takes.

No, with the notable exception of the deep-fry-pie’s twisted genius, mince pies are best at their most traditional. Christmas is not the time for transmogrification. There are a thousand meals in the year on which to unleash your inner Ferran, but Christmas dinner isn’t one of them. It is not a day for hesitation or deviation. It is a day for repetition.

The reasons are manifold. Nostalgia, certainly – we cling to our childish notion of what Christmas should be and want our children to experience the same “magic”; sanity, probably – painstakingly separating the leaves of Brussels sprouts when there are 20 relatives about to pitch up is a fast way to have a nervous breakdown; but most of all it’s just that, on the whole, the things we eat at Christmas don’t really need farting around with.

Try as you may to pimp your fowl, to remove the legs and confit them, or roll and stuff them, with a bird as big as a turkey there will, as Fergus Henderson pointed out last week, always be dry bits. And despite my new conversion to deep frying Christmas classics, you would be a braver soul than I to kick off Christmas morning by attempting Tim Hayward’s deep-frying method. That way lies a Christmas trip to A & E.

Then come the trimmings, which even at their most basic can, come The Big Day, still somehow pull the rug from under the most competent cooks. But they are already, by definition, the bells and whistles of the operation, and they don’t require tinkering. Bread sauce does not need cobnuts, roast potatoes do not benefit from spicing, and cranberry sauce does not demand stuffing with cream cheese (warning: not safe if you’ve recently eaten).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the one side dish that most seem to agree could do with a bit of embellishment is the sprouts. There is of course the ubiquitous pancetta – what’s wrong with bacon I don’t know – but broadly speaking the majestic sprout responds well to most treatments. My octogenarian grandfather, who is bereft of teeth, is particularly fond of them pureed with butter and a little nutmeg.

Finally, inevitably, comes the ruddy pudding. This groaning, decadent cannonball of fat and fruit and brandy arrives aflame to limp applause, and everyone would really rather it continued to burn. It is one of the more baffling things to choose to eat after the largest main course of the year, but it is ours and we don’t want it mucking about with, thank you very much Heston.

And what of the other bits and pieces? Which fruitcake decided it would be a good idea to put chocolate in a panettone? Or, for that matter, in stollen? And who would put tequila in champagne?

Food absolutism is a terrible thing. It chokes new ideas and stymies the fledgling cook. But on this one day of the year there is little that will persuade me to go off piste. There’s too much to think about, too many people to disappoint, and, frankly, too much fun to be had away from the stove.

Allegra McEvedy cooks Burmese duck egg curry, a recipe you don’t see much on menus in the UK