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.