Citrus recipes for Christmas - Telegraph Well, it's nearly here. The biggest culinary challenge in the entire calendar: the Christmas meal. Despite doing it every year I still fret about certain aspects of it. Timings can so easily go awry once you've started drinking champagne and building Lego (and don't even let me get started on what happens when you have a power cut...barbecuing the Christmas turkey is not an experience I want ever to relive). Whatever its potential problems, I love the whole event - the theatre, the immutability of the feast. Even at a fairly indulgent Sunday lunch we wouldn't tuck into a dried-fruit-and-brandy-laden pudding followed by port and stilton. I dread the prospect of the health police swooping on it as a project for downsizing (I can see it now, the Christmas meal reduced to a low-fat stir-fry of turkey breast and sprout leaves, heaven help us). Yet it's the richness of the meal that dictates my last-minute shopping tomorrow. When you do your big Christmas food shop you think that as long as you aren't going to run out of bread, booze or brandy butter you'll be fine; the reasoning being that the bird is so huge it will see you through several days. But even by Boxing Day I am desperate for really tongue-pricking flavours, the taste of fresh, citrussy and even bitter ingredients. It isn't because I'm worried about my health; it's just that my taste buds begin to crave them. All that turkey and stuffing and dried fruit leaves you thirsty. Oranges, grapefruit (both the pink and the more sour regular type) and clementines most immediately satisfy this need, but chicory, fennel, radishes, pomegranates and even raw beetroot do the job as well. They give you a different palette, too. Apart from the cranberry sauce, the Christmas Day meal is predominantly a range of browns and beiges. When you make a salad to go with the cold turkey on Boxing Day don't you want to toss oranges, chicory, fennel and pomegranates together? It's not just the snap and crunch, it's the midwinter colours. Our tastes have changed a lot, too. Thirty years ago we thought a bowl of waldorf salad was good with the cold cuts on Boxing Day. Now we quickly miss the clean taste of Asian flavours, the zing of root ginger and lemon-grass. And I always want the airy freshness of dill at this time of year - its piney breath seems so right in cold weather. So a run round the greengrocer's may be in order tomorrow. Pick up plenty of bauble-like pomegranates. Pile high those oranges. It's almost time to eat, drink and be merry. And it will be all the better for a little bit of zing.