How not to go feral

This week, a deeply satisfying, incredibly simple December menu, plus my ten tips to ensure you don’t go feral or get scurvy during the mad dash to Christmas.

Approximately 98.9 per cent* of all recipes that go viral on social media contain bacon, cheese or potatoes, sometimes all three. I’m excluding from this statistic those recipes that are actively and deliberately foul. You know the ones. A lunatic with a deeply unsettling manicure loads tins of soup, blocks of Velveeta (this is not cheese, rather cheese’s demonic impostor), a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a bag of marshmallows, some Tater Tots and a few containers of Jello into a foil tray, bakes it until next Friday and then, with a straight face, tells us how much they love their family. Not those. Those are just violence.

I’m talking about the ones that draw us in with their melting and sizzling, their bubbling and billowing. I watch them and I need a carb nap, ideally face down in a bowl of mash.

These ingredients are, though, the glorious triumvirate, the holy trinity of desire: salty bacon, melting cheese, and soft potatoes. Today, I’m sharing with you my own favourite ways of combining the three sacred ingredients in pommes de terre des vendangeurs, winegrowers’ potatoes, a sort of cake of joy, where the potatoes and cheese are wrapped in the loving embrace of an enormous amount of bacon then baked until they all achieve their most elevated state. The bacon is crisp, the cheese is molten, and the potatoes are so tender you can eat them with a fork. It is as though tartiflette took itself to the Met Gala.

I’m not sharing this recipe with you in an attempt to go viral. The only time I did that was when, years ago, I did a silly tweet about a very ambitious shop that opened on our Hackney high street selling twigs as door hooks for £30. The next day, a man who was living in the nearby cemetery laid out a blanket on the pavement by the shop with some bits of wood he’d gathered and was selling them for £10. I tweeted this how-we-live-now local vignette. Jeremy Vine retweeted it. Then thousands of others retweeted it. Next, a few newspapers asked me to write about it and, because I love money, I did. The woman who owned the shop was furious. I had to walk the dogs a different way to the park for ages. Then the shop closed and I moved to France, I can’t quite remember which came first.

So this recipe is not my attempt to go viral. In my experience, it’s a lot of hassle. I just wanted to give you this recipe because I love it. It’s just the thing for the cold weather, exuberant enough to serve to guests, simple enough to make for yourself if you want something sublimely comforting on a rainy Monday evening. All it needs is a little salad (for health) and you’re off to the races. Or on the long march to Moscow. Or to face the terror of the Christmas Big Shop.

I hope you make it. I hope you love it like I do. And because, apparently, life cannot be all BaconCheesePotatoes, below I give you my top tips to get through December without exploding, collapsing or crashing and burning. That would be very unfestive.

*I made this up. I appreciate that this is the attitude that ensured I never passed a maths exam in my life.

How to survive without scurvy

We don’t have to make gold-wrapped chocolate coins a whole food group at Christmas. We can make it easier on ourselves in the mad dash that is December by being prepared, like all the best Girl Guides. Here are some of the things I do to stop myself from existing on crisps, hope and fumes from my glue gun as I stick dried orange slices on everything that doesn’t move.