CONSIDERING she’s spent a lifetime winning awards for her high-end hospitality, it comes as a bit of a surprise to hear Claire Macdonald – who co-founded the Michelin-starred Kinloch Lodge hotel at Sleat on the Isle of Skye more than 40 years ago – express her dread about bringing in the new year.

“I hate it,” she says with a grimace. “I don’t know why but I do, year after year. I have a dread, a sense of foreboding, every time. At Kinloch Lodge, when we first started we threw ourselves into it, and it was very hard work. For our guests we’d always push the boat out, but really my idea of a perfect new year is to go to bed early. Have a really good dinner, then bed and lights out at 11.30pm, then you wake up and it’s all over.

“I think I have a fear of the future. I’m thinking of those people who died in Paris. A year ago they had no idea it would be their last New Year. I know it’s stupid, because there’s no point in worrying about what might happen not only to you, but also to everyone else. But I can’t help it.

“Then, as soon as it’s January 1, I roll up my sleeves and get on with it. Actually it’s a very good time to get the house in order and I like to clear out and organise my freezer and organise the diary.”

This year she and her husband Godfrey – Lord Macdonald of Macdonald, 35th High Chief of Clan Donald, whom she married at the age of 20 in 1969 – are foregoing the comforts of the hotel they painstakingly built up after he inherited it and three other crumbling piles on the sudden death of his father in 1970. The early days were hard, for with the inheritance came double death duties from Godfrey’s father and grandfather. Although not a trained cook she devised a dinner-party menu and became the full-time cook, and has said that the first Christmas there was “the most miserable five days imaginable”. It is credit to the pair that Kinloch Lodge is now listed one of the world’s top 25 small hotels, and its restaurant has held a Michelin star for five years under head chef Marcello Tully.

However. Even though seeing in the bells there would be an infinitely attractive proposition, they are relishing the novelty of retirement after a life of hard slog – and have chosen instead to dine at Luigi’s restaurant in Dornoch with their close friend Minty Dallmeyer, who runs the Craigiewood B&B at North Kessock near Inverness, and who was widowed last year.

“We live near Minty in a field at Muir of Ord, and she’ll stay over with us,” she enthuses. “At Luigi’s we’ll have fish and something like an avocado, spinach and bacon salad. We may, this year, even stay up past the bells. For the first time in 46 years we’re alone at Christmas and New Year. It’s wonderful, for we wanted so much to be at home.”

On Ne’erday itself, however, it will be homemade game pie with forcemeat balls for anyone who may care to drop by.

The couple no longer run Kinloch Lodge, having given over the reins to their daughter Isabella, who works alongside chef Tully and sommelier Sarah Lowe. They have both lost weight with the Dingwall branch of WeightWatchers, and appear to be thriving on their new regime.

“I really love the freedom after all those years. We can run downstairs and weigh ourselves on the kitchen scales stark naked, without anybody looking at us. It’s heaven.”

Hinting at the constant pressure of being such a high-profile figure in the notoriously competitive hospitality trade, she adds: “We can enjoy the gorgeous views over the Beauly Firth and spot the Red Kites. There’s nobody around, and there’s peace and we’ll never get over it. This is a new phase in our lives. I never anticipated feeling such a sense of relief.”

That’s not to say Claire Macdonald OBE – or to give her her Sunday name, Lady Macdonald, but never Lady Claire Macdonald – is putting her feet up at the age of 67, even if she does confide that she is “idle by nature”. The couple are having a house built by Hebridean Homes at Ardvasar on the Sleat Peninsula, not so they can move back to Skye but so they can spend more time there (she says there’s a fantastic Spar at Ardvasar). They want their four children (Alexandra, who is married to Baron Guttenberg and lives in Bavaria, Isabella, Meriel, who lives in London, and Hugo, a Cambridge graduate in Middle Eastern history) and seven grandchildren to be able to stay there too. “They’re getting so big now, too big for them to stay at Kinloch. Keeping three rooms aside for us all for three weeks doesn’t help the business.”

Macdonald, who describes herself as a “brash Lancastrian with a touch of Geordie”, was awarded the OBE in 2014 for her services to the food industry and her work with Marie Curie Cancer Care, and she has just published her 21st cookery book (her last book, Lifting The Lid, was a memoir of her life on Skye with Godfrey). Hardly a layabout, then.

The new book is devoted entirely to cooking with game – a surprisingly rare subject matter for a cookbook given the wider availability of pheasant, grouse, partridge, hare, wild boar, wild duck, woodcock and snipe and of course venison each year at this time. The season begins on August 12 (for grouse) and lasts until the end of January. She says that while venison does freeze well, she gives frozen birds just 14 days after the end of January before they deteriorate in both flavour and texture. So there’s still time to try it.

“Everyone should have game pie at Ne’erday,” she says. “Game is a homegrown seasonal product that is sought-after the world over and it’s good that all Scottish people, not just those living in rural areas, have more access to it now than ever before. Game is now widely available, and you can even buy it at the Co-op in Broadford and in Dingwall. We should buy it to support our gamekeepers and butchers. It’s eaten much more in Europe than it is here, which is a shame.”

Her preferred accompaniment to game pie is forcemeat balls which, she says, are delicious and make potatoes unnecessary; they’re made using onion, breadcrumbs, suet, lemon rind and flour, and then sauteed in oil.

She refutes my suggestion that game is offputting to the general public, as it has a stronger flavour than other meat and gamebirds are fiddly to prepare. “That’s a misconception. Sales of venison have shot up by 400% in the past year. The very mildest of game birds are pheasant and grey-legged partridge, which is for me the greatest treat. Hanging game, both feathered and furred, is essential for both texture and flavour. Well-hung grouse is strong in taste but it needn’t be overpowering, providing it’s not hung for too long.”

She’s quick to point out you won’t find recipes for casseroled squirrel or pheasant vindaloo. Why no squirrel? “Well, they’re mucky, aren’t they? Squirrels aren’t game; they’re vermin, just rats with bushy tails. And to eat an endangered red squirrel would be abhorrent. If I saw a recipe for pheasant vindaloo I’d think they’re using lamb or some other meat.”

Among the invaluable tips strewn throughout the book, such as freezing stock in upright plastic bottles rather than tubs to save space, and telling readers that Lea & Perrins is the only Worcester Sauce she uses because it contains anchovies and is therefore more flavoursome, are some surprisingly hip and accessible recipes. There’s stir-fry pheasant with sugarsnaps, ginger, garlic and lime (featured on these pages); pheasant fricassee; hare ragu for pasta; and venison with prunes and pickled walnuts is another.

Macdonald is passionate about Scottish produce and in recognition of her contribution to Scottish food she was presented in 2011 with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Farmers’ Union and the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland. She is especially enthusiastic about the Scottish Government’s national food and drink policy, launched in 2007 with the aim of increasing Scottish food sales at home and abroad to £12.5bn by 2017 with a focus on provenance and health, and its current phase of developing a Good Food Nation. In a previous interview she gave me, she praised the fact that Scotland had become an “exciting country” and that several people had remarked to her how it feels as if it has more pride and confidence. She gave the SNP “full credit for this”, adding that Richard Lochhead, cabinet secretary for rural affairs, had done much to raise the profile of Scottish produce and worked tirelessly on behalf of farmers, fishermen and local food producers.

She and Godfrey voted SNP in the 2007 and 2011 Scottish elections because of their admiration for Alex Salmond and his party’s focus on attracting investment to the Highlands. However, she has reservations this time round and hesitates to say how she will vote next May.

“We’ve always supported the SNP in the way they look after the Highlands, as they did it so much better than the Labour administration,” she says now. “However we’ve always been totally opposed to independence.”

Asked if she supports the Land Reform Bill (LRB) currently progressing through Parliament in a bid to make land ownership more transparent and its owners more accountable, she replies: “We don’t have an estate or own land, but I’d personally leave it to the owners to run their land. I wouldn’t interfere. I have the most profound respect for Richard Lochhead and his team but I think this is just meddling.

“I feel the SNP was better as a minority government, but dangerous as a majority. I’d go so far as to say I wish the Scottish Nationalists would get on with governing the country instead of interfering. Historically, any act of social engineering, trying to dictate what people can and can’t do with their land, has never worked in Russia, China or North Korea. So why should it work here?”

The LRB will end tax relief for shooting and deerstalking estates; landowners stopped paying business rates in 1994 under John Major’s Conservative government. The exemption was widely thought to be intended to protect the interests of major landowners. Does she think that’s fair? “I didn’t know that landowners didn’t pay business rates, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t, when other tourist organisations like ours do. That’s an anomaly that should be removed.”

Does she agree, as has been suggested, that gamekeepers would be forced out of work as sporting estates became unprofitable? “Gamekeeping is a profession, a vocation for which I have the most profound respect. They tend our land and they’re our greatest conservators. Saying they will get sacked is just rubbish, just tactics.”

She has not yet met Ian Blackford, the new SNP MP for Ross, Skye and Lochaber who ousted the late Charles Kennedy MP in this year’s General Election. Nor has she yet met First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and says she would “very much like to” in the New Year.

But first, she has to get herself through the bells. As a Catholic convert, she admits Christmas means more to her. “In the past everything was geared towards New Year, with a recovery day on January 2. Christmas wasn’t a religious festival or the big winter festival it is now.

“As a child Godfrey’s family would most likely have had locally sourced Skye and Highland game as the Ne’erday celebration meal. I think it’s a good time to bring back that tradition.”

The Claire Macdonald Game Cookbook is published by Birlinn (£17.99)

RECIPE

Stir-fried pheasant with sugarsnaps, ginger, garlic and lime

(Serves six.)

This is a recipe full of flavour, and which takes literally minutes to cook. Preparing the ingredients takes about the same length of time providing that you have that most time-saving of all kitchen gadgets – a really sharp knife. This is good served with either couscous or with boiled basmati rice.

900g/2lbs pheasant breast meat, sliced into thin strips as even in size as possible, and no thicker than your little finger

3 tablespoons olive oil

12 spring onions, trimmed at either end and each sliced in half lengthways

450g/1lb sugarsnaps, each sliced into three bits, on the diagonal

2 fat cloves of garlic, skinned and very finely diced

A piece of root ginger about 4cms/2”, skin pared off and the ginger diced finely

Finely grated rind of 2 limes and their juice

1 tablespoon toasted sesame seed oil

2 tablespoons strong soya sauce

A handful of coriander, chopped but not too finely

In a large saute pan, heat the olive oil until very hot. Stir fry the strips of pheasant breast, until they are opaque and cooked through, about three minutes providing the pan is sufficiently hot. Lift the cooked strips of pheasant from the pan into a warm dish, and add the sliced spring onions, the sugarsnaps, garlic and ginger to the pan. Stir and fry over a high heat for a further three to four minutes, then replace the pheasant strips in amongst the contents of the pan and stir in the toasted sesame oil, soya sauce, grated lime rind and juice, and the chopped coriander. There will be no need for salt for most palates, as the soya sauce provides saltiness. Stir all well together, cook for minutes, then serve.

Extracted from The Claire Macdonald Game Cookbook, published by Birlinn, £17.99