Stress-busting Your Christmas Dinner

Christmas dinner seems to be the one meal of the year that can get any cook’s knickers in a twist and yet it isn’t really any more complicated than a Sunday roast with an extra or two, depending on how fancy you want to make it (or if you are catering for a large amount of people).

I have put together a few tips to hopefully help your experience run more smoothly.

If you have bought your meat in frozen form then the main thing is to make sure you defrost it properly before cooking, because Christmas and food poisoning are not a nice combination!

The Food Standards Agency website has a guide for helping you cook Christmas dinner safely and they even have a little widget where you can enter the weight of your frozen meat and it tells you how long you need to leave for defrosting.

If the idea of serving dry turkey is laying heavy on your mind there are several tips that are supposed to help:

Roasting the bird upside down – these instructions look simple to follow; covering the turkey with pancetta or bacon before cooking to help lock in moisture and with the added extra of tasty crispiness; rubbing the turkey with butter, or inserting butter under the skin; roasting the turkey in a special roasting bag which keeps the steam.

This page has more tips for cooking a juicy turkey.

If you’re really worried about this, my advice is to serve a different meat instead – there is no hard and fast rule that say turkey is the only thing to eat for Christmas dinner and actually other meats like goose, which do not lack in moisture, are more traditional.

In our house we usually have roast chicken at Christmas however this year we are having lamb complimented by redcurrant and rosemary jelly that I made back in the Summer. I think the trick is to serve food you and your guests will like – there will be less waste this way, too.

Don’t feel boxed in to a traditional time-frame either. People all over the country slave away throughout Christmas day on a roast dinner and miss out on time with their family and friends. Not far back in history it was traditional to feast on the 24th.

Many people cook the meat the night before and then just deal with potatoes, stuffing, vegetables etc. on Christmas day to make things more manageable and guarantee that everything will fit in the oven.

We choose to eat our roast dinner in the evening on the 24th. It helps to calm down over-excited children before bed and frees up the whole of Christmas day so that I don’t miss any of the excitement. The years of magical childhood Christmases are fleeting and I wish I had thought of doing this sooner!

Keep things simple – you don’t need several kinds of gravy, stuffing or anything else. Choose an uncomplicated menu and stick to it. With all of the festive foodie television shows, magazines and adverts it can seem like with just a little bit more effort you could incorporate lots of new exciting ideas – wrong! Unless you have an abundance of time and helpers it will complicate matters and leave you flustered. It is better to do a classic, elegant roast dinner really well than it is to do too many things badly.

Don’t be a martyr – if you are entertaining a lot of people then delegate the work – your guests will want to help, so think of jobs that they could do to make things easier. Have them chop carrots, stir gravy, wash up, set the table etc.

Make time to put your feet up, look at your presents, play with your kids, chat with family and friends, watch your favourite film or whatever you want to do – Christmas is for everyone to enjoy, especially the cook!

More tips on how to cook Christmas dinner here.

If my post hasn’t answered all of your turkey questions then check this British Turkey site out because it answers pretty much anything you’d want to know about purchasing, cooking and safely eating and storing your turkey.