2004-12-16 - 12:17 p.m.

If you�re anything like me, you�ll be spending most of the next few weeks wondering if you�re not turning into the flabbiest gutbucket ever to try and wrench themselves off their fried chicken and hi-fat spread laden couch. It�s a fair assumption as the gluttony is already pretty much in full flow, last night�s obligatory restaurant visit leaving me wrestling with my innards for some time after the last unnecessary morsel had been forced down.

Note to self: when the waiter offers you four types of potato, and you just say, �Yes, that�s fine�, not realising he is listing the CHOICE of side dishes, then you should probably consider, oooooh, cutting down on the consuming JUST A TAD. Just because something�s on offer doesn�t mean you have to cram it into your piggy cakehole like someone�s going to slap a carbohydrate-themed injunction on you.

By way of remaining in denial, I have developed an interest in foods that I don�t eat which would be much worse for me. Specifically, the lard-o-ramic splendour of the Turdu�ken. For the uninitiated, this fabulous creation is a turkey, stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken. At just nine hours to cook, that�s a tri-bird feast-ival of white meat that doesn�t ruin your appetite between meals, so long as those meals are several weeks apart and interspersed with regular bouts of stomach pumping. If you�re suffering from some kind of life-threatening poultry deficiency, this is the one for you, providing you can get past the first four letters of the name, natch.

In days of old, when people didn�t really have anything better to do outside worry about the infant mortality rates, medieval banquette tables apparently groaned under the weight of an even more stupendous dish: a turkey stuffed with a goose, stuffed with a chicken, stuffed with a partridge, stuffed with a pigeon. I couldn�t find the name for this, but applying the above formula gives us the Turgochiparpig.

�Sorry, mum. I can�t have turkey this Christmas. I�m a Turgochiparpigarian now.�

If I was a medieval king, I would demand something much more exotic just to see how far you could push it. A whale, stuffed with a bear, stuffed with the Pope, stuffed with an albino gibbon, stuffed with a young Spanish princess, stuffed with the biggest prune in the word, stuffed with ninety hummingbirds which have been individually stuffed with swarms of bees that have been individually stuffed with ants.

Man, those medieval kings could do anything.