Double the fun in Switzerland

Heading home from my family ski-trip to Les Crosets, Switzerland, I'm carrying with me, along with the bumps, bruises, chapped lips and a sunburnt nose (and an as-yet-undigested kilo or so of Swiss cheese), a genuine longing to return. Odd, because after a ten-year hiatus since we last took to the slopes, I thought this was largely a mission to cross skiing off the list of things I want to do more of in the second half of my life. I thought this one was pretty much for the kids. But I had far more fun than I expected.

Yearning for more

Luckily, the children loved it too, as did our friends, all five of them. So we've agreed to be back within a year or three, same families, same resort, same chalet, right opposite the sensational Dents du Midi, a stunning Alpine ridge that catches the evening sun and persuades many to return year after year.

So what else made it so good? The snow, certainly. To arrive at your chalet around suppertime in the dark and find soft, fat flakes falling fast through a black, windless sky puts you in the mood like nothing else — except, perhaps, a quick snowball fight. Ours managed to produce plenty of laughter and no tears — not even when Oscar got Freddie right in the ear. It's special stuff, snow, and never more so than when you're together as a family.

Snow is particularly handy for the skiing, of course. The fact that our first day on the slopes — the first in a decade for us, the first ever for our kids — took place in near-perfect snow conditions was fantastic. If you're an average but out-of-practice skier, a dusting of fresh snow on a well-maintained piste is a true tonic.

A bit of both

The weather got better, as in hotter, from each day to the next. Inevitably, that meant things got pretty slushy on the lower slopes by lunchtime. But by the second day, we had sussed that a hard (well, full) morning's skiing, plus an hour or so mucking around with the kids after a quick café lunch, was generally going to sate the snow lust for the day. Usually, one or two of the grown-ups were back in the chalet with most of the kids by 3pm, giving everyone, particularly me, plenty of time to think about supper.

In fact, the preparation of a hearty supper for ten was never much of a sweat. And this was largely down to a well-executed shopping trip to the nearby town of Champry at the very start of the week. Les Crosets, a small village at 1,400 metres, is really all about the skiing. But Champry, at a windy 400 metres and 20 minutes down the mountain, is a proper little Swiss Alpine town. It's not exactly the hive of artesanal food boutiques I had hoped for, though look beyond the big brands in the supermarkets and you'll find plenty of cheese and a few good-looking cured meats sourced directly from the surrounding countryside.

Say cheese

But the real food find was Champry's cheese shop, Fromage, etc. We loaded up with goodies, including an outstanding aged Gruyre, a red-skinned goat's cheese that was great for grating on pasta, and a Vacherin Mont d'Or, that thick-skinned, runny cheese that comes in a round pine box.

I was on dinner duty most nights; not unaided but largely unchallenged in my culinary dictatorship — except by children demanding Nutella pancakes. In the end, I made a large batch of pancake batter most nights and kept it in the fridge. Pancakes proved the perfect plug for the gap between lunch and supper and the best possible instant fix for the fact that on a skiing holiday, everyone's always hungry.

Pancake party

From Day 3, pancakes were allowed only at breakfast and within half an hour of returning to the chalet from the slopes, when they bought the chef a little time to prepare a slightly more sophisticated supper aimed at pleasing all members of the party (aged 4-44).. In some ways, the pancake approach underpinned all my cooking endeavours on the holiday. Successful ski cuisine has to deliver on the après ski appetites' uncompromising demand for maximum starch with maximum taste while also meeting the tired chef's requirement of minimum labour and another glass of refreshment. So the chalet chef has to be able to function on autopilot and yet deliver crowd-pleasing, tummy-filling and flavour-laden feasts.

Given this mission, pasta dishes and risottos are no less valid for being obvious. Pasta carbonara, as you probably know, is the most cunningly time-efficient way yet devised to shovel 1,000 very tasty calories down each of ten hungry gullets. Another great starchy stuffer is polenta. I found the best way to get the kids to give it a chance was to cut thick slices, fry them until crispy, then serve with grated parmesan. The next time, it came with a topping of sautéd wild mushrooms.

Twice as nice

My two big set pieces of the week were a bollito misto late lunch on the terrace and the fondue on our last night. The cooking, by the way, is the easy part. Don't be tempted to add anything to the melted cheese except the prescribed quantities of kirsch and a twist of black pepper. Have a few salad leaves standing by, if you must, but forget starters or pudding — just make a date with a pot of molten cheese and a mountain of cubed, crusty baguette. And get ready to be very silly.