Sometimes Simple Is Best

When does the meat feast end? When I said my parents go over the top with Christmas food orders, I really wasn't joking. By the time we'd whacked this hefty three-rib of beef in the oven, we'd already had goose, ham and pigeon breasts in days previous. Morning, noon and night was domintated by conversations of "so, what shall we have with the (insert meat here)?"

Christmas dinner has to be fairly extravagant, or else it just ends up being another roast dinner. Time is taken over what to enhance the stuffing with, and what can be done to jazz up the sprouts. Some, I hear, even make roasted potatoes and mashed potatoes! It's an event in itself, one that many people get worked into a stressful frenzy about.

Similarly, as pigeon is such a treat, we spent a good while thinking about what would work well in a salad to accompany it. As it happens, a soft leaf with toasted pine nuts, red onions, beetroot, tomato and grilled fennel work very well indeed.

So, when it came to the beef, we were exhausted of ideas. Simple is best, I declared - roasted garlic mash, green beans and red wine gravy, mustard and horseradish on the side. It was a heavenly piece of beef; well-aged, cooked to rare and extremely tender and succulent. As I learnt from my steak at Hawksmoor, no fiddling is required when you have a quality piece of meat.