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.