Outside, life is cold, life is grey; inside, life is beautiful!

Today is the day! Merry Christmas! Feliz Navidad! Bom Natal!

I start the day by making chilaquiles, a great Mexican breakfast, and well in keeping with the Mexican adage that one should breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and sup like a beggar.

First I cut some old tortillas in to strips, then deep fry them in olive oil till they are crispy. Then I add some green salsa in a pan, and mix in some shredded meat; usually it would be chicken, but today I have some pork left over from making stock the other day. I top the mixture with cream and chopped onion (and yes, it's raw), and serve with a dollop of frijoles and a couple of fried eggs.

"Chilaquil", by the way, was the nickname of a character in the amazing Mexican film "Amores Perros", in which Gael García Bernal first came to prominence.

While the chilaquiles mixture was heating up, I unplugged the slow cooker with the fabada in it and withdrew the ham hock, bacon, chorizo and morcilla, to leave them to cool. Incidentally, in Mexico, instead of the ham hock I would have placed a bone from a cured serrano ham and some offcuts from the ham, both of which are quite cheap.

After phoning my relatives, the porky bits of the fabada are now cooled down, so I strip and chop the meat from the bacon and ham hock and put it back in with the beans, along with slices from the chorizo and morcilla, and now we have the complete fabada, a classic winter stew originally from the north of Spain, although there are similar stews made from cured pork and dried beans in other mountainous regions, such as Portugal's feijoada à transmontana.

As I breakfast is digesting, I watch the first feature of the day, "The Tin Drum", one of my all-time favourites, and realise for the first time that it stars Andréa Férreol, who is also in "La Grande Bouffe", after which this blog is named.

Many others have commented on the complexities of the Tin Drum, so I will just mention some of the gastronomic aspects. One of the main characters, Matzerath, first appears in the film as an invalid soldier working as a cook at the end of the First World War, who has learned to put his feelings into soup, and thus he wins the heart of nurse Agnes -- well, sort of.

Matzerath works as a grocer after the war ends, but still likes to cook on Sundays. But family life is really much less idyllic than it may sound and this reflects a German society that is about to plunge into chaos and drag much of the world with it. Just one little vignette is Agnes reacting with such disgust to Matzerath collecting eels from a rotting horse's head slung into the sea, that it prompts her to resolve an awkward personal dilemma by stuffing herself with fish until she dies.

As I munch my way trough my fish course -- cod made a couple of days ago -- I recall that the author of the original novel, Günther Grass, often regales us with recipes in his books, much like another favourite author of mine, the sadly departed Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

The next film, "La Grande Bouffe", is almost entirely gastronomic, at least in the telling of its story. It could be described as a suicide pact, but perhaps we should just see it as people who won't let the health consequences get in the way of the ultimate feast of haute cuisine -- with especial emphasis on the haute bit.

It may sound somewhat morbid, and definitely has scenes which many may consider grotesque, yet there is not one single murder, not so much as a drop of blood, or a remotely violent act. The filming is very evocative as we need to borrow a lot of French terms to describe how the four bourgeois gentilhommes lock themselves up in a fin-de-siècle mansion, with deliciously decadent Belle Époque décor and wonderfully sleazy music.

I admire actor Ugo Tognazzi's character for getting up at 6 a.m. to strain some stock in the film, and find myself wondering what it would be like to own all those copper-bottomed pots, and what it would be like to know how to cook with deer and boar. I also marvel at the film-makers' erudition and familiarity with epic French gastronome Brillat-Savarin (who I've barely heard of) as well as for setting the film in a mansion whose garden was frequented by 17th century poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux.

The film's characters make my own gorging seem really modest. I follow the fish with some fabada, washed down with some Esporão Reserva, an exquisite wine from Portugal's southern, sun-drenched Alentejo region, which I brought back from a recent trip to Lisbon, as it is otherwise unavailable over here.

A whole lotta soakin' goin' on

I find a lot of food requires a bit of forward planning, especially for the home cook with a day job and with ingredients which need soaking.

Having realised yesterday that I still have to use up some kidney beans, I thought I'd turn them into frijoles refritos, a great side dish to a hearty breakfast, and remembered to put them in to soak. At the same time, I soaked a bit of slab bacon separately, to remove the saltiness.

Normally, I would make frijoles by cooking them overnight in the slow cooker with a smoked ham hock, but today I just want to use up some odds and ends, so about 45 minutes in the pressure cooker will do, or about the time it takes me to do some ironing. Oh, and I add some epazote to the beans, a Mexican herb which smells a bit like aniseed and is popularly reckoned to prevent flatulence. Of that I wouldn't be so sure -- I think changing the water while you soak the beans is more effective -- but frijoles refritos don't taste the same without it.

Then it is just a case of frying chopped onions and bacon, then adding the beans and mashing them with a hand-masher while they, too, are fried. When they are all mashed, it is time to add some of the stock slowly, until the beans are mushy but not sloppy. Any left-over stock can be put aside in the freezer and thrown in the next time I make soup.

But that isn't all the soaking for today! No, it is time to put the white beans under water in one pot, and in another, the slab bacon and smoked ham hock (yet again, to remove the saltiness).

By the time I get home from work, some time after midnight, as I open a celebratory beer, the plan is to drain the beans and porky bits, plonk them in the slow cooker and cover with water, along with a bit of saffron and pimentón (a bit like paprika). Then I will put some chorizo (sausage) and morcilla (a bit like black pudding) on top, inside their skins, as they are a bit delicate. Then it's time to put on the 10-hour setting and get some sleep.

Christmas Eve Eve

Today I will do as much preparation as possible for Christmas as there are just two days to go, I have the day off, and I want to cut down to an absolute minimum the time I will spend in the kitchen on the 25th.

I'm feeling a little bit frayed, so I start the day with huevos rancheros for a late breakfast. This I do by briefly frying a couple of tortillas (maize, por supuesto) then putting them on a kitchen towel, while I heat up the refried beans (taken out of the freezer last night) in the microwave. Then I fry another tortilla for a bit longer, until it is crispy, then a couple of eggs, laying them on the previously fried tortillas and beside a dollop of the beans with a bit of crispy fried tortilla on top (called a totopo in Mexico). All that's left is to drain any oil left in the pan and heat up some salsa verde (likewise from the freezer) and put it on the beans and voilà! The whole thing takes about 5-10 minutes, although I previously had to spend a bit of time making the salsa and the beans, before freezing them.

A couple of hours later, after reading the papers, I pour water, flour and yeast into the breadmaker and set to work on the cod dish, which I aim to make today, ahead of Christmas Eve, when I have to work till late.

First thing is to drain the cod and cook it in milk. Next, I have to cut some potatoes into cubes, slightly bigger than dice. Normally I would peel them, and save the peelings for stock, but these have pretty thin skins which I can practically scrub off. The recipe calls for frying the cubes for just long enough to cook them, rather than make them crispy. To save a bit of time, to make sure they are evenly cooked and because it is Christmas, after all, I deep fry them in some olive oil left over from the last time I made Spanish omelette.

As well as being tasty, olive oil has the advantage of being able to stay very hot without smoking, so the potato cubes are well cooked before they are crispy and never get soggy with oil. Better still, they are cooked more quickly than by boiling, and don't fall to bits. I will leave the oil in the pan until Christmas morning, when I will use it to make crispy fried tortilla fragments to put in some chilaquiles.

Now it is time to drain the cod and use the milk to make a béchamel sauce with. This I do, but fry thinly sliced onions until they are transparent before adding corn flour, then slowly and carefully adding the milk, and stirring to prevent the sauce getting lumpy. I no longer add salt to my food, especially as the cod will be salty enough, so just grind some pepper.

I also grate some nutmeg, wondering how many years it will take me to get through all those nutmeg that have been languishing in an old jam jar for two years since I bought a packet of them. The same goes for the mace, of which all I need is half a teaspoonful every time I make a Christmas pudding, and many other spices.

Anyway, on with the cod itself, which has now cooled enough for me to peel separate the skin and bone and loosen the flesh itself into flakes, and cod is an ideally flaky fish. The flakes I mix in a couple of terra cotta casseroles with the potato cubes, then I pour on the béchamel and garnish with a generous helping of cream and lots of offcuts of smoked cheese, grated using an old hand-held, manual rotary Moulinex: so sad they went bust a few years ago.

Now all we need is to pop the casseroles into the oven and we have bacalhau com natas, one of the 1,001 or so ways that the Portuguese make cod.

Meanwhile, competing with the cheese and cod smells is the glorious aroma of baking bread in the breadmaker, which soon squeaks to tell me the loaf is ready. I life the lid and marvel at the way the bread has risen, then tip out the loaf and hear a reassuringly hollow echo as I tap it and leave it to cool. Some purists may object to the use of machines, but this is one short cut I need to make and at least I know what goes into my bread. Besides, there's nothing like being able to walk away and leave the machine to do its work, which mainly consists of timing.

All the while, I listen to Radio 4 over the Internet, and vow, again, to one day have sound piped in to a kitchen, along with that external window and the herb garden I have promised myself. In the meanwhile, I enjoy listening to a book programme looking back on interviews with Ian Rankin and Anne Enright, both of whom I also had occasion to interview.

Incidentally, I make a mental note to use up the rest of the spuds quite soon. For some reason, a 10-pound bag costs less than three pounds bought loose, so perhaps I will use up the remaining six or seven in a Spanish omelette and some shepherd's pie, or bubble and squeak, before they start sprouting.

Meanwhile, I swap e-mails with a friend in Spain, whom I advise to inject her Christmas turkey with white wine. A couple of years ago, I was delighted to find a re-usable meat syringe in a shop for cooking accessories. It has a big fat needle, as opposed to the skinny ones on hypodermics, enabling hefty intramuscular injections of vino.

Soupy Saturday

All I really have to do on Saturday is skim the fat off the bacon/ribs stock and make an old-fashioned stick-to-your-ribs pea soup like my grandmother used to. For this, I sweat some chopped carrots and bacon in the bottom of my old friend the pressure cooker and pour on some dried peas .

Some recipes call for celery, but the problem is that you have to buy bunches of it when you will at most need only a stick or two. On other occasions, I would have cooked the rest and frozen it, ready for future use, but I am about to move, so I just do without celery.

It is now time to pour on the stock and simmer while I settle in to a good book, getting up every now and then to stir the soup. It would be tempting to put the lid on the cooker and get the job done quickly, but thick soups like this tend to stick and burn.

When it's done, I have a bowl of the stuff with a butty made from slices of the left-over bacon cubs; just the job on a cold winter's day.

Friday Cod dreams

My Christmas preparations continue apace. Today, I just have time after the gym and before going to work to use the good old pressure cooker to boil the bacon chubs, along with some spare ribs I found lurking in the freezer, and a collection of potato and carrot peelings, and onion skins, to make some stock.

When I get back from work, I strain the stock and put it in the fridge overnight. I throw out the boiled peelings, and pick up the chubs and spare ribs. Before watching my Friday night DVD ("Saturday Night, Sunday Morning"), I strip the meat from the ribs and shred it slightly, before sticking it in the fridge. I plan to use it to add to the chilaquiles I will make on Christmas morning for my breakfast. True, it would be more usual to use chicken, but I needed to use up the ribs and they were useful for making the stock.

Oh, one last little chore before I watch a young Albert Finney in black and white. I have to put the salt cod in to soak. It's half a fish, sawn into fair-sized chunks at the Portuguese supermarket. I plan to soak it for about 36 hours: the Portuguese would do it for 24 or just 12, but I've been in North America long enough to worry about the impact the salt might have on my blood pressure.

The salt cod smells really wonderful, and when cut has a marvellously marbled appearance. I also love the way they wrap it in crispy, waxed brown paper. The curing really does make a difference, and doubtless explains why the Portuguese insist on this, even though they haven't needed to in all the decades that sea-borne refrigeration has been around. Cod was once so much a staple in Portugal that they can honestly boast of having developed 1,001 ways of making it. There is a book with that many recipes in it, and that may be an under-estimate, as every restaurant I ever visited in the four years I lived there had its very own house recipe.

Of course, there are very real concerns over just how long we will be able to eat the stuff for, with stocks diminishing and scientists insisting on an outright ban on fishing to preserve the species. But I am hooked, and will keep indulging every now and then.

Back in the kitchen

The shopping trip, described in my previous post, is however just the prelude or, if you prefer, the hors d'oeuvres to the business of cooking.

Back in the flat, I chop onions and garlic, putting the skins aside for the next time I make stock, and fry them in the bottom of a pressure cooker whilst peeling and dicing the aubergines (and no, I don't “sweat” them first by sprinkling them with salt).

I then chop and chuck in the courgettes, peppers and tomatoes and am well on my way to having a Spanish “pisto”, a vegetable stew I take to work instead of salad in winter. My own little variation is to let it all stew gently for half an hour, until it is nice and juicy, then throw in some barley and lentils, so I have some carbs and protein, too. I put the lid on to cook the latter items under a good head of steam, then turn off the heat and leave it to settle.

For the time being I will just soak the bacon chubs, which look like gammon steak, to take away some of the saltiness.

Start at Kensington Market to make decent nosh

Although I have been disappointed at restaurants in Toronto, which mostly serve expensive and inferior imitations of food which originates very far away and has not travelled well, one huge compensation is that I can buy the wherewithal to make quite decent -- or at least unadulterated -- food myself.

Kensington Market in Toronto is not a covered or open air market made up of stalls, but a district of specialist shops selling mainly food, in and around Kensington Street, hence the name, after the North American fashion of dropping the word “Street” from street names.

It is one of the few places where half-way decent food is available in this city without paying outlandish prices: indeed, it is often a lot cheaper than the local supermarket and it is the only place to go for some items. It is also the nearest – but not near enough – to the kind of decent inexpensive food people take for granted in most of Europe or Latin America.

Since arriving in North America, I have been driven in a way I cannot quite understand to cook at home more than ever. I can adduce many reasons, but even taken together they don't quite explain; it's as pointless to try and explain as being in love, as the force driving me is bigger than I am, and is certainly not just about me.

So I am driven to Kensington Market. It is just about close enough for me to go on foot about once a fortnight and today the trip takes a bit longer after last Sunday’s 25 cm of snow, which has left waist-high snowbanks on the curves. At the least the temperature feels almost balmy at -1 °C, after recent weather.

As I workk late, I often have mornings free and find it better to come here midweek, as the place is very crowded on Saturdays, and will be very hectic indeed as Christmas gets closer. In fact, it is with Christmas in mind that I make today's trip, and plan ahead so that I can eat in style on the day itself. That, and the fact that I have overnight shifts looming, means I have to lay in for a siege.

My first stop is at Perola, which specialises in Latin American food. I pick up Mexican green tomatoes (tomatillos) and serrano chilies, which I will use to make salsa verde, which cannot be beaten when it comes to making breakfasts or filling quesadillas. I also pop in my reusable bag a packet of chocolate slabs, to make hot chocolate, a word Mexico gave to the world, and a tortillera, or a press for making tortillas, although the latter is more of a souvenir and reminder of the formative years I spent in Mexico.

Perola also sells Central American snacks, and smells wonderfully and uniquely of cooking maize flour prepared in a way Mexicans call “nixtamalizado”.

The shop is an Aladdin's cave of Mexican wonders, stacked with tins of Mexican courgette flowers and huitlachoche, a fungus which grows on maize cobs, and is a delicacy dating back to Aztec times, which might explain why the name hasn't passed into common currency along with other words the Aztecs gave us, like chocolate, tomate (tomato) and chile (chilli). Also to be found are better known items like chilpotle and jalapeño peppers, as well as fresh or dried chillies known as poblano, de árbol, habanero, pasilla, de cascabel, amongst others.

Here they even sell chuños, dried potatoes which I had not previously seen outside the high Andean regions of Bolivia and Peru, but which had somehow found their way to this corner of Toronto.

Next stop is the Portuguese supermarket, where I buy salt cod for one Christmas dish, then chouriço sausage, morcela (what Brits call black pudding, or blood sausage to North Americans) and an artery-clogging slab of bacon, all to make a Spanish-style bean stew called fabada. I also get some fried fava beans and look longingly at the frozen ones, but I can only get so much at a time. Likewise, I walk past the frozen sardines (great for accompanying salads), octopus and other fishy delights, but pick up a lump of cured ham, which is a bit dear but no more so than processed meats in the local supermarket, and will go a long way when sliced thinly in the traditional way.

This place is also great for olive oil, and half of an entire aisle is given over to it. I have seen nowhere else in Toronto where the stuff is guaranteed to come from one country only and has the guarantee of purity Europeans would look for: the percentage of acidity on the label (must be no more than 1.5 %). You won’t find olive oil with controlled origin, olive type and vintage (like wine), as you do back in Portugal, but this shop sells the next best, as well as traditional Portuguese terra cotta cookware. Portuguese is all you hear here, and I get a cheery “Bom Natal” as I leave.

In the European butcher’s I realise they sell leaner slab bacon, so I hope the Portuguese stuff is tastier, though I realise it is far less likely to have been industrially made. Now it’s time for me to also get a smoked ham hock, the nearest thing I can find to what the Spanish call lacón, in order to complete the fabada. To that I add some things called “peameal bacon chubs”, which I plan to use to make stock for pea and ham soup.

I sigh as this year I won´t be picking up a turkey or shoulder ham this year, which will save me a lot of trouble, though I would like to cook another Christmas dinner in future.

In many ways, I would have preferred to stop at another shop run by a butcher called Max. He’s that rare example in Toronto of a butcher who cuts the meat himself, rather than just purveying it, as can be seen by his beefy arms, but Max keeps kosher and won’t have everything I need today.

I regret the fact that neither place sells old boilers or chicken bones to make stock with, as they would in Europe or Latin America, but Max tells me, “No one makes soup anymore.” So it goes.

Round the corner, on Kensington Street itself, is a cheese shop where I return for the first time since my previous visit prompted an angry phone upon realising I’d been overcharged. I decline to be served by the assistant who had previously been curiously unable to weigh cheese in front of me, upon which the manageress recognizes me and gives me a refund with a smile.

Here I pick up some Portuguese serrano cheese, which is rare enough even in Lisbon, and it tastes like a mature camembert, yet is hard enough to slice. Also, I grab some offcuts of smoked cheddar that are great to cook with and something labelled Caerphilly, and although I somehow doubt it actually comes from the Welsh county of that name, it is miles better than anything I can get at the local supermarket. I am also offered olives and smoked fish; all very tempting, but even at Christmas there’s only so much I can eat.

The friendly but efficient manageress apologises, again, for my previous visit, and I thank her for redressing my grievance. She and her assistant are of Portuguese origin but Canadian born, so while I have to order in English, I still give them another “Bom Natal” as I leave.

It is just this sort of human contact which the supermarkets have taken away from shopping, along with very much else, and which alone makes the expedition down here worthwhile. The fact they can sell decent cheese at a reasonable price (by Canadian standards) really does put the supermarkets to shame.

My final call is at a Chinese greengrocer’s where I have found the produce to cost one-quarter of what it does in the local supermarket, as well as being fresher and more varied. Here I admire the way the owner deftly crams everything priced the same amount per pound at once on to the scales – aubergines, green peppers and courgettes -- to save time. I also grab a cheap package of bruised tomatoes which are more than good enough for cooking and knock spots off tinned stuff.

There are also a couple of very decent Greek and Portuguese “wet” fish shops, as we used to call them in England, when they were much more common, to distinguish them from places selling the stuff fried in batter. Yet again, I really can't buy everything.

Not every place is great here, and lest we should think that all that is not dispensed in a supermarket is gold, I have found the shops selling nuts and dried fruit to overcharge, and I have been less than impressed by one of the cheese shops, while the chocolatier is just sad.

I now walk back home, especially not stopping at the restaurants, as it is they which also drive me down here to buy the wherewithal to make the authentic and tasty dishes which even I can make, but simply can't find anywhere. So I walk past the hybrid-Portuguese place, and don't even glance at the fake tapas bar, the Tex-Mex joint or the “fusion” restaurant. I really think some one should coin a term for fake tapas served abroad, to distinguish them from the real ones, in the same way “Tex-Mex” is now understood to mean something quite different from true Mexican, and quite inferior.

The Mexican place is worth a look, as it is as near to the real thing as you'll get in Toronto. If it were genuine, they'd be serving romeritos at this time of year, but of course they're not.

The problem with these places is that they never even come close to what I used to find on any street corner in Mexico, Portugal or Spain and there is never, ever any local cuisine – it just doesn't exist.

As I proceed, I spare a split-second to wonder how sustainable all this will be, in terms of expense, not to mention the unhealthy animal fat, the food miles and the production of so much animal protein. This flicker of guilt getting in the way of enjoyment must come from living in North America for almost four years. One day, I promise, I'll get around to reading "Anglo-Saxon Attitudes", to see if I can find any evidence of Anglo-Saxons tending to eat to live, rather than to live to eat.

On vera. It's on a wish list with of all those other books I never get around to reading, and although it's not for lack of trying, I do wonder when I might succumb and read less, as every one else seems to. An uncle of mine drives a mobile library in rural northern England, and tells me his readers are mostly elderly and thus he has less customers every year as their places are not being taken by younger people, "because nobody reads any more," he says.