After I’d spent a full hour noting down the many reasons I love winter, I thought I should ask myself the same question about summer.

The words were a short plume of monosyllables – sun, sea, surf – and then they pretty much dried up. But that’s summer for you. It’s the most obvious of seasons. In fact, among the seasons, summer is like the clichéd good-looking, good-times footballer who doesn’t go in much for all that book-learning stuff.

Winter is far more interesting, like the poet in the corner of a Parisian café or Dublin pub – mysterious, maybe dangerous, lost deep in thought, but his words ever-ready to draw you in. That’s seductive old winter for you, all right.

Winter is staying in. It’s for catching up on the serious series you’ve avoided during lockdown – Chernobyl, perhaps, or a doco on the evils of Big Pharma. Summer is Big Bash. Don’t get me wrong – I’m a summer lover, but the lures of winter are not to be underestimated. Here are my top reasons to love it.

Winter breakfasts are better. Fritters, porridge (chia seed, congee or oat), the ‘full catastrophe’ (aka the full English), hot tea and thickly buttered sourdough toast with marmalade. Winter breakfast trumps that summery bowl of Bircher any day of the week and especially at weekends when we have time to linger.

Baking, whether for lunchboxes, hand-arounds at the footie (when we’re allowed) or just for the sound of sawing through a fresh crunchy-crusted loaf you’ve made yourself, is so much a part of winter. It’s almost worth baking just to have your house smell of freshly baked cakes or biscuits.

Apples should now be fresh from the tree rather than shipped in from cold storage. We should revel in that, not just with apple pies, baked apples and apple turnovers, but also the joy of an apple, fresh, unadorned. Just meditate as you bite into a perfect crisp Pink Lady or Granny Smith to savour the snap of each bite, the juiciness, how both sweetness and tartness gambol across your tongue like lambs who have never heard of mint sauce or rogan josh.

Braises, stews and casseroles and the smell of them cooking are cold-weather joys. Now’s the time to take cheap cuts of meat and less-than-perfect vegetables and let time and heat transform them into something magical. That might be a claypot of Cantonese-style braised brisket, a stroganoff or a goulash.

All those carbs make sense now.

Puddings: summer is ice-cream or fruit; winter needs its own app to keep track of all the desserts it owns. Crumble, sticky date, self-saucing pudding and GSD (golden syrup dumplings) are just the tippiest tip of this iceberg.

Open fires and red wine – ’nuff said. Although I’d like to include mulled wine and mugs of hot spiced cider.

Bonfires and brown spirits, be that a dram of whisky, a shot of rum or a wee hot toddy. Brown stuff goes so much better when you’re rugged up under the stars watching embers dance up into the velvet night.

Walks along windswept beaches with the rhythmic pounding of the surf in your ears. Best of all, crumpets waiting for you when you get home for tea.

Silverbeet is highly productive and has the earthy robustness to stand up to the biggest flavours you throw at it – olives and anchovies in a puttanesca sauce, for instance, or the salty hit of feta in spanakopita. And I love that it’s two vegetables in one. The leaves to sauté, say, and the stalks to fry and mix with wine vinegar and sugar to make an instant agrodolce pickle.

Mash is the perfect winter side – or braise topping for that matter. Make it with pretty much any root vegetable, but acknowledge that a properly made potato mash is a thing of true beauty.

Summer’s soups are just no match for the big-hitting bowls of winter – pea and ham, French onion (even better if it’s made by a real Frenchman – I’m looking at you, Manu), leek and potato, chicken and barley. Or how about Thai pumpkin – or pretty much any pumpkin soup you care to imagine. I’ll leave you with my current soup of the moment: ribollita. Some describe it as leftover minestrone reboiled with stale bread in it, but these are the same people who don’t see that the rainy weather that makes these soups so welcome should be celebrated for the greenness it brings to this parched brown land.

Eating out
With restaurants and cafés reopening – albeit with restrictions – this winter will always be remembered as the time we got reminded of the joy of eating and drinking out. So book a table and support your favourites. That’s the best winter warmer you can give our much-loved hospitality professionals.

For Matt’s dark chocolate self-saucing pudding recipe, head here.