Happy New Year! And festive feasting

New Year's Eve fondue

Happy New Year, all! Hope you've been able to muster some cautious optimism for the year to come.

Bit of an unusual festive season for us. We entertained! And we mostly didn't eat meat!

My aunt came to stay with us for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year. She's been a vegetarian for almost 40 years, and I couldn't face the idea of making two different meals for three people, so we resolved to cook vegetarian at home while she was with us.

In the end there were loads of things I planned to make that I never got around to (the gado gado, cheesy polenta with roast shallots and figs, sage and walnut lasagne and the white bean puree with roast radicchio can all wait until her next visit) but what I did cook went pretty well, I thought.

Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's savoury carrot and feta cake

Felicity Cloake's perfect panforte

Nigella's take on pizzocheri - pasta with potato, brussels sprouts and cheese - for Christmas Eve dinner

I started planning what to cook for Christmas Day a couple of months ago. We aren't wedded to any particular traditional Christmas meal, so we weren't trying to fit vegetarian food into a pre-existing format, but we wanted something a bit sumptuous and celebratory. I originally thought that a stuffed pumpkin would be good, but decided that there isn't enough room inside a pumpkin to have a decent amount of stuffing, so I reimagined it as a baked, layered dish.

Sour cherry couronne

We started Christmas day, however, with couronne. It's mostly Paul Hollywood's recipe, but substituting sour cherries for apricots (I didn't bother soaking them) and lovely Italian crystallised citrus peel for the raisins. Instead of plain marzipan I used a new-to-me brandy marzipan, which packed quite a wallop.

Mezze plate

For lunch we just had mezze - bought hummus, felafel, artichoke hearts, olives, dolmades and stuffed peppadews, with some leftover carrot and feta cake, and a few bits of pickled carrot and mooli. Then the layered baked squash for dinner.

November's trial run on the Christmas squash

In my practice runs I had used delica pumpkin, which sliced into neat crescents which cooked evenly and looked like a pretty sunburst.

Unfortunately Ocado let me down on the day and delivered a butternut - good flavour but not as pretty!

The layers of squash were interspersed with sauteed onion, loads of rosemary and sage, crumbled sourdough bread, toasted hazelnuts, crumbled Stilton cheese and garlic. Then I poured cream and white wine over the lot and let it bake slowly.

We had a persimmon and chicory salad with it (Diana Henry's recipe, although for obvious reasons I left out the cheese and nuts). Delicious, if not in any way photogenic.

Final version of baked layered squash

There was no need at all for dessert after all that! Later in the week I made a quince and clementine trifle, but we really didn't go in much for pudding at home.

Quince and clementine trifle

On New Year's Eve we had a fondue for lunch, and then friends came over for tea and cake. I'd been looking for an excuse to make Ottolenghi's walnut and halva cake, and this seemed like just the time. It's a very good cake.

Ottolenghi's walnut & halva cake

The other main home-cooking highlights of the festive period were a rather triumphant take on megadarra (I used siyez bulgar instead of rice, topped it with pomegranate arils and goats curd and served it with runner beans stewed in tomatoes) and pairing Ottolenghi's bulgar with mushrooms, feta and dill with Gizzi Erskine's brussels sprout, pomegranate and pistachio salad. Which end up looking quite similar, so fortunately we didn't have them back to back.

Megadarra and runner beans

Ottolenghi's bulgar and Gizzi Erskine's sprouts