I stuffed the capon with a mixture of sausage meat, black pudding, ham, breadcrumbs, stoned dates, sultanas and chestnuts all held together by half a bottle of manzanilla. It was thick, black and heady. Before filling the bird I rubbed down the inside with ground cinnamon, salt and pepper. Once it was stuffed and trussed I rubbed the same mixture over the outside before lubricating it with olive oil and more manzanilla.

The bird weighed about 7 kilos stuffed and I cooked it for about three and half hours before leaving it to rest for 40 minutes. The best part of the meal was the gravy. Once i poured the fat from the pan there was a thick sticky treacle like residue stuck to the bottom. It tasted sweet from the dates and the sherry and Galen and I greedily dipped our fingers in.

We drank Pasion de Bobal. I had had a glass when Kristen and I ate at Morito last month and I was able to track down a couple of bottles in Lunya.

Boxing day morning started with the sun shining and blue skies. There has been so much rain over the last few days we decided on a walk where it would not be muddy underfoot.

The beach at Moreton was grey and forbidding, the tide was going out and the sea blurred against the wet sand. The people walking seemed dwarfed by the concrete of the promenade and the scale of the sea and sky.

Birds swarmed out over the water their flight breaking and pulling back together. Closer to shore gulls argued with black crows, and the oyster catches were disturbed by dogs chasing balls. By one of the breakwaters we say a heron and a white egret standing perfect still by the waters edge. An oyster catcher bounced in the water. I though it was tapping the sand to draw up the worms but then I saw one its legs at an angle behind it.

When we got the the coastguard building at Hoylake we came across half a dozen or so small boats pulled up from the slipway. Some of them had been painted to break up the grey.

Back at home and listening to Gil Scott Heron.

Halfway through a Christmas lunch and the adults are asleep and the children watching Dr Who. The Christmas pudding is still in the steamer waiting to be broke open and there is a great board full of cheese waiting to be eaten with the quince paste I made a few weeks ago.

The good news is that all the presents have been opened to a general acknowledgement that this has been the best year ever – we had glasses of champagne with a bowl of oysters, smoked salmon and crisps. There was a lurch of recognition when I saw that the oysters had come from Craig Balfour. It seemed right that we ate them, if that is what you do with oysters, drinking Moet & Chandon.

The capon cooked well. We had it with roast potatoes ,sprouts, roasted parsnips ans carrots. The carrots were cooked down in water, honey and crushed cumin seeds and we caught them just before they started to burn.

Listening to Suvjan Stevens and looking forward to the cold capon tomorrow.

A good Christmas Eve supper after the food shopping in the morning.

It is a nonsense call something it is not (carbonara should really be eggs, cream eggs and ham) but there are similarities here particularly if you have previously made your spagetti carbonara with smocked bacon. This is a smooth, fulfilling dish – a good way to start an indulgent weekend. It will go well with most types of pasta but I think it works well with thick strips of tagliatelle, the creamy sauce and flakes of haddock clinging to the strips of pasta.

1 glass of white wine

500 gr un-dyed smoked haddock

500 gr thick-ribboned tagliatelle

350 ml crème fraiche

juice of half a lemon

finely chopped dill or parsley

salt & pepper

Put on water to boil in a large pan.

Warm the wine in the bottom of a wide pan until it starts to simmer. Put in the fillets of smoked haddock skin side down and poach until the skin can be pulled away from the flesh.  Take the fish out of the pan and leave to cool for a few minutes. Then, using your fingers, pull away the skin and discard. Break up the flakes of flesh, but not too small. Lick your fingers.

As the water for pasta comes to the boil add the crème fraiche and lemon juice to the pan the haddock cooked in and start to warm through.

Cook the pasta. It will probably take about 10 minutes, but check the instructions, and taste until it is ready.

In the meantime put the  fish back in their pan and stir gently into the creamy sauce. Check for salt and pepper and add half of the chopped dill.

When the pasta is done, drain and pour back into its pan. Stir into it half of the cream and smoked haddock sauce and then pour into a warmed serving dish. Pour over the rest of the sauce and sprinkle over the rest of the dill or parsley. Serve with Low in the background doing their Christmas album. Possibly the best Christmas record of them all. Happy Christmas..

After Diane Arbus we had coffee and fresh orange juice in the cafe in the basement of FOAM. The Dutch are good at coffee and orange juice. The orange juice comes cold and freshly squeezed, round the back by the bins there will be a pile of the discarded skins and pith, there are bits in it and it puckers the mouth. The coffee is strong and black – as it should be.

There was talk of a market on Albert Cuypstraat and without giving it much thought four of us walked down there. The sky was grey and heavy over the city but after the rain of the previous evening the air was still. As we walked down through the streets there was a sense of a city and its people going about its business on the Sunday before Christmas. It was more low key than at home, the pressure to celebrate was not pushed up hard against your face, but there were lights and red Father Christmas hats.

We were not sure what to expect of the market and a lot of it was like markets anywhere, cheap fashion and tat, people walking through, eyes open for a bargain. Although, being Holland, a lot of the people were taller than elsewhere. Along the half kilometre street it ran down we passed stalls selling the whole range of Dutch food you could hope for.

There was a stall selling soused herring out of wooden barrels to be slathered on white rolls and eaten with finely chopped onions and lip smacking relish. A  stall selling loempia, great, fat Indonesian Spring Rolls stuffed with bean sprouts, Chinese greens and a variety of chilli sauces. Two stalls selling poffertjes, small puffed up Dutch pancakes, just over an inch across covered with a thick dusting of icing sugar. And at the very end of the market a giant bag of frites advertising the stall next door, a jumble of chairs under some bare trees and a small queue waiting to pay for a cardboard white cone of the crisp hot potato and its covering of mayonnaise.

At the end I was sorry not to have picked up a handful of the smoked eels we had seen at one of the fish stalls. Those would have fitted into the hand luggage.