That’s what happened to me.

And then morning came and so did the rain. And I looked out of the window at the drizzle/pouring rain, my good hair day resting unsuspectingly on my shoulders, and I thought to myself, “Well, that damn woman’s going to want to go on the walk anyway, so you’d better get used to the idea.” And then she turned up and, yes, we went for the planned walk.

Despite having passed Knole Park maaaany times in my life, always craning to see if any deer can be seen from the road, I’ve barely been into the park and I’m pretty sure I’ve not seen the house before. To get from the car park to the park we had to walk down a steep and very muddy walkway and then finally we were out into the open parkland and the rain went to work on frizzing up our hair and working its way through my coat. But it was fun. The rain doesn’t really bother me now that I wear contact lenses and it no longer affects my ability to see. Sure it was kinda wet and a bit cold, but it all gets outweighed by the smugness one feels at going for a calorie-burning walk at the very start of the year. Hey, look at us, aren’t we virtuous and awe-inspiring?

In fact, after burning off all those calories – most of them on the return journey back up the steep and very muddy path – we had no option but to drive into town and have a long lunch at Café Rouge. Suzy had a croque madame, while I had a delightful little baguette with hummus, spring onion and roasted red pepper. Both dishes also came with a side of the best fries ever. My shunning of the usually employed ketchup is surely a sign of their magnificence.

See how this post started with a healthy walk and ended on a pile of salty fries? Yes, my thighs do too.

Suzy and I celebrated Christmas Eve with Chinese takeaway tonight. The plan was to watch Love Actually too, but it turned out, I suppose unsurprisingly, that we can fill an evening with talking quite easily, so the DVD stayed in my bag.

The Chinese food was delicious and we polished off a bottle of delightful pink fizz too. We’re both sensing the possibility of a new tradition …

We decided to “be European” and exchange gifts tonight – Suzy gave me a beautiful pin for a buttonless cardigan I bought during our recent pillage of H&M, as well as an always welcome chocolate orange.

Above she’s studying the posh chocolates I gave her and on her lap is the upholstery book that accompanied them. See that stool under the mantelpiece? Suzy reupholstered that herself and now it stands there waiting to be put to use when Suzy hosts Christmas for her family tomorrow.

A few more snapshots from the evening …

This takeaway place makes the best chicken satay ever and is a large proportion of the reason I suggested having Chinese takeaway. I’m glad to say that I was not disappointed and got thoroughly covered in bits of peanut and satay sauce, which I licked up in a most unladylike manner.

This afternoon I’m turning my fingernails yellow as I chop, peel and cook 14.5kg pumpkin. The job should get done today, which is in sharp – and pleasant – contrast to the three tiring days the job took me for my last pumpkin harvest in 2007. Back then I had 32kg of pumpkin to deal with. Mind you, the photo set I made of the process has been quite useful for reference today.

Seeing as we still have bags and bags of pumpkin in the freezer from 2007, I think this next lot should help keep us going for the next decade or two.

The nutty taste of the Jarlsberg is so delicious that I thought I’d share this bread, perfect for a treat or social gathering. I think it originally came from a Waitrose recipe card.

Ingredients:

85g / 3oz butter, softened
2 garlic cloves, crushed
175g / 6oz Jarlsberg, coarsely grated
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1 round loaf or ciabatta

1. Preheat the oven to Gas 5 / 190°C / 375°F. Beat the butter and garlic together in a bowl.

2. Grate the cheese and chop the parsley.

3. Add the cheese and parsley to the butter and mix together.

4. Cut the bread in half, lengthways. Spread the cheese mixture on the cut sides of both bread halves. It’s easiest to use your fingers for this, not least because the warmth of your fingers will keep the butter soft and easier to spread.

5. Wrap each half loosely in foil and put on a baking sheet. Bake for 20 mins, unwrap the foil and bake for a further 10-15 mins until starting to turn pale golden. Cut into wedges and serve.

Ingredients:

2 large chicken breasts
1 garlic clove
3 rashers of streaky bacon
4 sundried tomatoes
a handful of basil leaves
375g/13oz pack of ready-rolled puff pastry
flour, for dusting
1 egg yolk, beaten

1. Preheat the oven to 200ºC/ºC fan/Gas 6. Chop the chicken breasts and crush the glove of garlic. Add both to the food processor and whizz until the chicken is minced.

2. Cut the bacon and sundried tomatoes into pieces – scissors work really well. Chop the basil and add all three ingredients to the chicken. Pulse for a few seconds in the processor to mix. Season well. (Or forget, like I did, and notice no difference.)

3. Roll the pastry out on a lightly floured surface and cut in half lengthways. You’re aiming for two strips of roughly 11cm x 35cm. Split the chicken mixture between the two strips and spread evenly, leaving a small margin around the edge; using your fingers is the simplest way.

4. Fold the long edge of the pastry over and roll it up like a swiss roll. Pinch the pastry together to seal.

5. With a sharp knife, cut each roll into pieces about 2.5cm wide. At this point the rolls can be frozen for up to a month.

6. Place the rolls seam-side down on a baking sheet and brush with beaten egg yolk. Bake for 20 minutes until golden.

You mix up quite a stiff dough, which is then piped from a bag with a star nozzle into hot oil to fry. It took me two hands to squeeze the dough, so I had a sous chef to cut the lengths. This sous chef was getting kicked out of the house in the evening though, hence the need to reheat churros. By undercooking the sticks the first time, reheating them in hot oil in the evening worked well at finishing them off and making them crisp and warm. But serving them completely fresh is still absolutely the best way to do it … and Suzy has a very particular time for eating them too.

I served the warm chocolate sauce in individual tea cups, with a little pile of churros on the saucer. Then I brought in the big bowl of all the rest of the churros and my guests proclaimed their love for me.

It turns out that at some point during the evening, while I was doing something – probably with cheese – in the kitchen, the other three used my laptop to order tickets for my birthday present and then deleted their browsing history to cover their tracks. Just like we used to do at school.

For the record, they are not in the process of secret booking in the photo above. They were much stealthier than that. Anyway, the tickets are for kick-ass seats for us all at Cirque du Soleil in London in January. And here is where I attempt some kind of segue from hoping we don’t have to join in the acrobatics to talking about how the end of our evening turned into a ridiculously silly dance party to cheesy Mexican party music. I’d bought a bunch of tracks on iTunes to entertain my guests while I was in the kitchen, but didn’t remember them until the end of the meal. What the hell, we thought, let’s put them on now … and let’s have Suzy teach us to samba, fail at that and generally arse about. The next day I could barely walk, but it was a lot of fun.

Here’s the grand finale video:

Sometimes quesadillas are made by folding the circular tortilla in half, with the filling in the middle, but I did mine with two whole tortillas stacked with the filling in middle. They fit nicely on a baking sheet, so I cooked them in an oven rather than a frying pan. Plus, the more hands-free approach enabled me to get on with sprinkling more cheese on the kitchen floor.

I wanted to offer two different fillings, so gave everyone a quarter of a two quesadillas – one had chorizo and pine nuts with cheddar and feta and the other had mushroom, red onion and cheddar. I also made potato wedges with a sprinkling of ground cumin in the olive oil in which they were coated.

Here’s the judgement video:

Having already told you a little about the preparation I did for my Come Dine With Me evening, you know that I was getting ready for a Mexican evening. And that is why, when my guests turned up, I answered the door to them wearing my embroidered top from Ecuador and one of the four sombreros I’d ordered online. Each guest was then presented with their own sombrero as a party favour and was touchingly delighted with being given a stupid hat to wear.

I was able to borrow three margarita glasses from my Aunty Ann. There used to be four, but clearly there was a party that got Wild one night and now there are three. The glasses sat in my office for a while before the dinner party, along with a bunch of other clues as to the night’s theme such as a printout of the Wahaca menu, a Mexican cookery book and of course there was also the pile of avocados and limes in the fridge.

The pico de gallo and guacamole were pretty much the Pioneer Woman’s recipes, just a bunch of stuff chopped up and put in a bowl to look pretty. I served these as an accompaniment to tortilla chips while I put the starters together in the kitchen. If I’d been in the same room as the tortilla chips not a lot would have been accomplished other than perhaps self-inflicted dehydration as I finished the whole bag without sharing.

The first dish was tostadas – one with a base of shredded chicken and one with a base of refried beans. By the time I’d got to the end of just preparing the starter I’d already turned the kitchen into a bomb site, hence the floor being the only space for a photograph of the plated food. I suppose it wasn’t until I was into the main course that I started spreading cheese onto the floor too. I keep campaigning for a Kitchen Dog to take care of dropped food, but none is forthcoming. Still, Christmas is just around the corner …

Here’s the video from the guests:

I knew what kind of food I wanted to serve very soon after we set the dates for our second round of Come Dine With Me. The trouble was that as I was to be the last evening, months and months in the future, there wasn’t much point in using all that time to prepare, in case one of the others had the same idea in the meantime. So each of the preceding three evenings had a moment of trepidation for me: had the hostess crept into my brain and stolen my idea? We each ended up doing a certain country: USA, India and – big sigh of relief – Greece and my idea was similarly to be the cuisine of a particular country: Mexico.

I think that I’ve said before that I wasn’t overly enamoured of my first CDWM evening and so I was in competition with myself to get one up on myself and go to town on the planning and presentation. To that end I placed an order online and a few days later a big cardboard box turned up – big, but as light as a feather. What could be in it?

Although I knew I liked Mexican food, I’d never actually made any myself, so I practised my dishes in advance, working out where I’d make a few little tweaks on the night. I researched the menu of Wahaca and watched episodes of the cooking show presented by the restaurant’s founder, Thomasina Miers. This introduced me to a typical Mexican dessert that was admittedly unfamiliar to me, but I think plenty of others know it. And yes, I am being deliberately vague, you’ll just have to wait for the post.

My guests were likely to be driving themselves on the night, so the drinks needed to be non-alcoholic, thus making the otherwise obvious margaritas a no-no. So I’ve still never had a margarita and still have no idea how tequila tastes. I figured I’d make “mock margaritas” and you’ll find that if you ask the internet how one might do that, there are a lot of dreadfully clever and amusing people out there, telling people who have previously asked the same thing that a non-alcoholic margarita tastes like a margarita without the tequila. So helpful. I pooled a few ideas and decided I’d make a kind of orange/lemon/lime mix with crushed ice, put it in a margarita glass and call it a day.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find margarita glasses? I should have done a James Bond evening: martini glasses are ten a penny over here. Margarita glasses, not so much.

Also, do you know one quite effective way of crushing a bag of ice?

What a long day. It started early in Salzburg, with my boy and a surprise cake, sparkling candle and singing and ended in England with my girls and more surprise cake, celebratory fire and singing. In between came a lot of talking in German, a flight home, my traditional failure to unpack properly, if at all, the opening of lovely presents, birthday phone calls, a much-needed shower, way too much food and a lot of talking into the night. Now I must to bed and maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow with some sort of idea of what day it is, what time it is and where I am – all questions which I have been unable to answer immediately for myself at some point over the last few days.