You may as well get acquainted with some of the recipes in your new book even if you don’t intend to try them all. Flick through the book and mark any pages that feature recipes using your favourite ingredients. It is good to enjoy a new take on things you already like and even if a whole book only expands your repertoire by one or two recipes it will have made a positive difference.

Having Indian parents means my uncle is a dab hand in the kitchen and he always knocks up something pretty special as a starter for Christmas dinner. Salmon seems to be at its very best when it is curried and he first brought round a salmon curry a few years ago. That dish took on legendary status, but it never reappeared until this year when it was very welcome.

Other curried starters on Christmases past have included dishes using quail which is a fantastically delicate way to begin a meal.

However, this year I’ve discovered something strange about myself. I’m no longer capable of finishing either. I can’t gorge myself on chocolate like I used to do. Even the savoury treats are too much for me. Perhaps it has something to do with all the alcohol that is consumed over the Christmas period.

Nevertheless, it appears that the end may be in sight for one of my personal traditions at Christmas time.

I feel that the government needs to introduce a program whereby people can tell at what point they need to seek professional help as a result of brie abuse. There ought to be a system of guidelines that tells you how much cheese you can consume in weight before an intervention is staged and you are offered rehabilitation on the NHS.

Playing the lottery on a local, regional, national or international basis can be so much fun. The first stage of the process is to pick out your numbers. This can be achieved by thinking up numbers which have meaning to you personally, such as a birth date or lucky number, or you can go for a lucky dip and put it in the hands of fate to decide.

You are no longer limited to taking part in lotteries based in the country in which you reside as geography is not a limiting factor. This means that as well as playing the lottery game online, be it the Powerball or Mega Millions draw, you can also check the results from anywhere, as long as you have an internet connection.

Results from draws like the Florida Lotto and NJ Lottery are now at the touch of your fingertips as you can find them out from a reputable lottery website. Here you can look up past results to see if the ticket you have contains all the matching numbers.

When the draw has been made and the results are now official, you will be waiting with baited breath to see how your numbers match up. Thankfully, there are now lottery pages you can refer to which include details on all the world’s most popular lotteries, such as the California Lottery which takes place in the United States.

So don’t wait around any longer; be sure to check the latest lottery results to see if any of your numbers came up. Who knows, you could have been sitting on the winning numbers for some time!

Check out the Alottery.com web site if you are looking to buy lottery tickets or find the latest lottery results.

I’m thinking specifically about pastries. I’m a fan of the simplest croissants available from Parisian patisseries, which usually cost around a euro and are always freshly baked on the morning of your purchase.

No matter where you buy you croissants here in England – supermarket, café, restaurant – they never quite hit the standard of the authentic French equivalent. Light, crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, French pastries are far superior to their sorry counterparts this side of the channel.

Sadly, you get the impression we’ll never get pastries of a Parisian standard here in the UK because there just isn’t the demand for a real French patisserie that bakes its own goods every morning.

The fact is, for many people, a salad is dull and uninteresting unless it has a few embellishments. Even if you introduce unhealthy elements to a healthy dish, you are still getting the benefit of all the good stuff in there with them, so there’s no reason why you should feel guilty.

There is only an issue if you find that you generally end up with more unhealthy salad ingredients on the plate than healthy ones. Then perhaps it’s time to revise your recipe.

Instead, it makes sense to go for bread that really lasts. Pitta bread doesn’t tend to suffer for freshness because you generally toast it or microwave it to bring it back to life.

Whenever you fancy a bit of bread with your evening meal, it makes much more sense to buy it fresh in the morning, on your lunch break or on the way home from work than relying on bread from the weekend.

The sauce in question is known as Imam Bayildi and it is made of friend or baked aubergines in plenty of oil. At length I found a jar in the special foods section at Sainsbury’s and it is well worth checking out provided you aren’t put off by loads and loads of olive oil.

The version I found came with large chunks of aubergine which make a great addition to pittas and other snacks or main meals. However, it didn’t quite match up to the Felicini version, so if you want a great taste of this stunning accompaniment book yourself a table asap.

Forget decisions about what to cook, the last minute dash to the supermarket for the vital ingredient, slaving over a hot stove and the washing up. Why do all that when, just for once, you could order a pizza to feed the whole family for as little as 1p thanks to tasty bingo?

All you need to do is come to play every Thursday night at 6pm at ohmybingo.com. You can pre-buy 1p cards for the weekly game and then you just need to be the first to bingo on the Pizza Pattern!

You can play as little as you want to, with no minimum number of cards to purchase. And at 1p a card, even the maximum number of cards (96) won’t break the bank!

Best of all, if you win, the prize will be credited immediately to your account. So, if you play tonight at 6pm, you’ll still be in time to order dinner for all the family should you win…