I’ve never really been much a one for Easter, as holidays go. I was never a huge fan of chocolate, even as a toddler found the idea of a huge bunny hopping about the globe dispensing candy to good Catholic children somewhat unconvincing, loathed the idea of having to eat fish on Good Friday, and always suspected that when you consider the Catholic doctrine of “free will” that Judas was well and truly stitched up. After all, if he hadn’t done his bit, The Son Of God would have survived, lost followers along the way as they aged and became more socially conservative, and wound up a disenchanted old hippie who grew his own weed and whined at Mary Magdalene alot.

So it was something of a heavy heart that I learned that the responsibility of cooking the Paschal meal would fall to me. Usually this particular feast is dished up by the beer-swilling slattern I call Sister, but her oven had packed up. So of course my mother said, “I’ll cook the Easter Dinner!” which of course actually means “Patsy will cook the Easter Dinner!” Personally I thought this was the perfect opportunity to give the whole thing a miss, but no. Even my cries of “But no-one aside from Mother has even been in a church for at least a decade!” and “At least one if not both of my nephews could actually lay off the chocolate for a year or two!” fell on deaf ears.

So I did what every self-respecting gay man who lives with his mother does: I got out my Nigellas and decided that this would be “Creative Easter.” In short, I got ambitious. There would be lamb, yes, but I would get my family to eat anchovies if it killed us all. There would be no peas, no mashed or roasted potatoes, and no way in hell was I making dessert. The lamb would be liberally slashed, and marinated in anchovies, garlic, lemon and rosemary. It would also be boned, so I could use the bones to make home-made lamb stock. Instead of peas, there would be braised lettuce hearts, and glazed carrots. And instead of roasted or mashed potatoes there would be-and this is where I detoured onto the road to insanity- boulangerie potatoes. Boulangerie potatoes are basically the same thing as a dauphinoise, except they’re cooked in stock, not cream. Much lighter and crisper, and truly heavenly to consume if you’re not the one who spent hours layering the damn dish and now loathe the very sight of them. You must slice the potatoes very thinly, you see, then blanch and dry them, then layer them in a dish, sprinkling with an onion and herb mixture and dotting with butter as you go. Which takes AGES. It occurs to me now that possibly the etymology of the term “dauphinoise” hails from the tragic little son of Marie Antoinette, who died under mysterious circumstances. It is now my firm belief that he spent the remainder of his short and miserable life imprisoned in the kitchens of the Paris Ritz, being forced to spend day after day assembling this dish and eventually, like Neville, died of ennui. Hence the name.

Dinner, when it was finally on the table- somewhat behind schedule due to my not realising that if you’re serving a dauphinoise at four pm you’ve got to get started at four am- was largely a huge success. The lamb was simply stunning, and not a single member of my ancho-phobic family noticed the anchovies all over the lamb. They also, aside from Mother, loved the potatoes, which is just as well since if they hadn’t they’d all be dead right now and I’d be writing this from the internet cafe at my local gaol. Mother, by the way, didn’t even try the potatoes. When the dish was passed to her she replied, “No potatoes for me. I ate enough potatoes during the war.” That she is not currently walking the streets with a carving fork sticking out of her neck is strictly down to my anti-anxiety medication. She also turned her nose up at the braised lettuce hearts (“Does anyone actually like cabbage?”), and the general reception to my lovely leaves was a tad lukewarm. I thought they were gorgeous, but as they weren’t swimming in butter the rest of my family were non-plussed.