Now, I don’t know about you but all the TV celeb chefs put me under pressure at Christmas. I feel I should produce fabulous food and I try, I really do, but it just doesn’t happen.

For instance, in the past I’ve tried making the weird and wonderful stuffing recipes that chefs like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson say are very quick and easy to make… well, they aren’t. Mine ended up tasting how I imagine the lining of a sandal would.

And this morning, while watching GMTV, I saw an advert for Nigella’s ‘girdle buster’ pie and just fleetingly I thought, “ooooooo I’ll try that” but I won’t because I know it’ll end up looking like a road accident.

Nigella also advises that we should prepare a good deal of our Christmas food well in advance and freeze it, but who has the time? Or the freezer space? My freezer is currently full of a rather massive turkey – that I felt behoved to buy early in case the supermarket sold out – and my usual foodstuffs which I have to admit are microwave meals and bread primarily.

I saw one of Nigella’s Christmas shows where she made a pomegranate meringue mountain and it summed up the difference between us. She said that as a child, she used to love getting a pomegranate in her stocking… we used to get tangerines, the easy peeler kind that come in a net. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten pomegranate. You can see a clip from that show here…

And her kitchen is massive! When we bought our house, my kitchen was colourfully described as a “galley kitchen”. What that means is that it’s so narrow you couldn’t swing a stunted kitten in it, never mind a whole cat. So that kind of makes me feel better… it’s clearly why I can’t cook well. I’m being held back in a culinary sense by my tiny kitchen.

I love to watch River Cottage Christmas shows because Hugh takes the pressure off, mostly because nobody in their right mind would cook the stuff Hugh does so that’s ok. For instance, I watched an episode of River Cottage Christmas on one of the Sky channels last week and Hugh prepared a dish that involved stuffing salami and the goose’s giblets into its neck… no ta Hugh, I’ll pass on that one. I like to gingerly yank the bagged up giblets out of my defrosted turkey with tongs and chuck them in the bin while keeping my eyes firmly closed.

Ditto his recipe for goose feet confit; nobody would make that surely? However, just in case you do in fact want to eat goose feet this Christmas, you can find Hugh’s recipes here.

And as I mentioned, Jamie too makes me feel inadequate and kitchen-challenged. I tried once to make a chocolate yule log that he made look childishly easy on the show… I had to end up making a sort of irregular sandwich shape out of mine because it just would not be rolled up, no matter what I did. Jamie’s filling was smooth and appetising whereas mine was lumpy and took on the colour of hospital walls.

His mince pie recipe from last year tempted me too because there were loads of cheats involved… but in the end, I bought two dozen Mr Kipling’s. Here’s the recipe that tempted me.

Come Christmas day, my kitchen will be full of freezer packets being hastily thrown in the bin and shop bought Christmas pudding sitting in its little plastic bowl waiting for me to nuke it in the microwave, but I just know I’ll feel a pang of inadequacy when I catch sight of those candlelit spreads that the TV chefs turn out while not sweating or setting anything on fire and sipping sherry rather than swallowing advocaat by the pint just to try to remain calm while trying to cook everything on my little cooker.

So what say you? Do TV chefs raise the bar so high that we mere mortals have no hope of reaching their culinary heights this Christmas or do you find you can in fact replicate their creations? Let us know.

You can see Nigella’s Christmas kitchen tonight on BBC2 at 8:30pm and Jamie Cooks Christmas on Thursday 18th December 9:00pm, Channel 4.