Christmas tips

to make life easier

I love Christmas. Here are some things that have made my life easier in 30 years of hosting it. (Every time I write something like that down I do the maths and think ‘hang on, that can’t be right’. But it always is).

My kitchen this morning. Falalalala! Should have moved that milk thing out of the way for the pic

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Things you could do now, in a sporadic and manageable way

• Making gravy on the day is madness - there’s enough going on. Just do it at some point in the next couple of weeks, one evening after work when you have time, and freeze it. This also allows you to make a superior, flavour-packed gravy, which makes a huge difference to the whole meal. I swear by Jamie Oliver’s Get Ahead Gravy, recipe here. Once you’ve made it, add THAW GRAVY to your phone calendar for the morning of December 24. Then sit back and feel pleased with yourself. This gravy means that the foundation stone of your Christmas dinner is laid.

• On another day before Christmas, make and freeze the bread sauce. This is extremely low-effort and satisfying. I use Nigella’s recipe (with extra peppercorns and cloves). Leave out the butter and add on the day. Again, remind yourself to thaw it the day before. You may need to add a dash more milk when reheating.

• You can also freeze parboiled roast potatoes up to a month ahead. I have never done this, but people whose cooking I trust swear by it. My issue is that for me roast potatoes are kind of the whole point and I couldn’t bear it if they weren’t 100% amazing. But know that you can do it and that people report outstanding results.

• What I do instead (on the 24th) is peel, chop, parboil (for exactly 10 minutes), drain, put them back in the pan, rough them up a bit so they’ll have maximum crispy edges when they roast, and then lay them out on roasting trays in the (cold, stationary) car ready for the next day. The cold car makes a perfect second fridge.

• If you make the spuds to freeze ahead, this is the point at which you’d freeze them, i.e. parboiled and roughed up. Jane Lovett, who never lies, says you can freeze them (or lay them in the trays overnight in the car) with oil or fat, i.e. that the fat doesn’t need to be hot when they go in the oven, but I am afeart of doing this. Thaw before cooking, obviously, ditto the below.

• You can do make-ahead parsnips in the same way, this time parboiled for 2 minutes. I have frozen these, as I care less about parsnips than about potatoes, and they were perfect. I should really try it with the potatoes.

• Red cabbage actively benefits from being made in advance, and you can also freeze it.

• You can freeze home-made or shop-bought pigs in blankets.

• You can make cranberry sauce weeks in advance, if you’re making rather than buying, and just it sits quietly in the fridge, biding its time.

• And brandy butter, ditto.

  So at this point you have gravy, bread sauce, potatoes, parsnips, cabbage and pigs good to go. I mean, you’re practically there.

  PS I really like this post with recipes from Ben Lippett about, very specifically, optimal potatoes and gravy (it’s free to read).

  

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Guests

• You want guests to feel like they can go and have a nap/read their book/lie in the bath whenever they feel like it, not like they’re on parade at all times or like they have to join in with everything you do. This means it’s worth putting a bit of thought into spare rooms, particularly if the spare room is a box room or a home office with a sofa bed wedged in. Give them the means to make their own tea/coffee. Provide milk in an insulated bottle so it stays cold. Also biscuits and a pile of books they might like, a decent reading light, fluffy towels, and get out the nice bedding. If your hot water isn’t on constant, tell them when it comes on and off.

• No one wants to be at someone’s house feeling slightly peckish but not knowing what they’re allowed to eat without having to come and ask you. Either put your Christmas dinner ingredients on a separate fridge shelf or shelves and say ‘Help yourself to anything except from here,’ or to put all your Christmas dinner stuff in the car, which has plenty of space and makes a perfect creature-proof second fridge.

• Related: get enough snacks in for the guests.

• Guests will ask what they can do to help. For me there is only one answer, which is to take charge of the washing up/dishwasher whenever they’re passing. Loading and unloading the dishwasher is the most helpful thing any guest can do in any situation, but especially at Christmas. It makes such a huge difference to morale not to have to clear up as well as cook, especially if you’re eating in the room you cook in, i.e. the kitchen. Obviously don’t make one poor lone guest be the dishwasher Dobby - ask everyone who’s staying to help too.

  

• Another guest (or a daddy) needs to be in charge of wrapping paper, roaming the land with a binbag at regular intervals. For me, dishwasher + binbag action = festive serenity.

• Put out an enormous drinks tray and make someone in charge of ice and mixers. Handy tip: you can freeze tonic water, meaning the drinks stay cold for ages. Also if you have some lemons that need using, slice them up and freeze them to use as ice cubes.

• Deploy guests for peeling duty on Christmas Eve (and have enough vegetable peelers on hand to make this effective). We do peeling to Carols From King’s and it’s extremely jolly.

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Starters

• Starters are lovely, but don’t feel wedded to the idea that you need a starter, a main course and a pudding. I rarely do starters in life, and never at Christmas. What I do at Christmas is provide big platters of hearty snacks to have with drinks (we don’t eat until late afternoon/early evening). These can be shop-bought charcuterie, cornichons, butter and good bread, a huge cheese plate with crackers (better one or two magnificent whole cheeses than lots of bitty smaller pieces), toasted pitta with bowls of humous and other dips, crostini with various toppings, squares of smoked salmon and soda or rye bread (I’m very keen on all smoked fish); a big pile of pakoras and samosas (coriander chutney to dunk), or anything else you like the idea of provided that it is robust (millions of ideas online, good blueprint here). The hearty snacks keep people going happily for hours.

  

  Cheeseboard from Olive magazine

• I keep the platters in one form or another - usually one platter and one big cheese plate/board - going throughout the whole festive period, meaning that there are always things to pick at. It’s a good idea to stock up on pickles and relishes and to have something crunchy on offer, like sticks of celery or a big crisp salad, to avoid texture monotony.

• The platters are pretty much assembly jobs, so it’s worth taking the time to make them look nice, like playing food Tetris, rather than plonk things down in slabs. This is particularly true of leftovers, which benefit for sauces and dressings and a little zhuzhing presentation-wise.

• If you go down the platter route, you will need more bread and crackers than you think you do.

• Get, or make, a ham, or half a ham. No one is ever hungry when there is ham. The ham is Christmas. The ham is joy. You need white crusty bread, in my view, and plenty of unsalted butter, though of course the ham can be deployed in all sorts of non-sandwich directions too. Ham is easy: at its most basic you simmer your gammon in water, take off most of the fat, stud what’s left of it with cloves, brush it with something sticky, like honey or maple syrup, and bung it in the oven until the glaze is burnished.

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How not to be in a flap on the day

A turkey is a big chicken. Most people can successfully anoint a chicken and bung it in the oven with some aromatics. Turkey aside, if you’ve made things ahead, you just need to reheat them and do some green veg and carrots. It’s not actually super arduous. The main issue is oven and counter space, and the endless mess. Here’s what I do.

• Get up and take the turkey out of the fridge as early as possible - we’re talking two hours at a bare minimum. It wants to be comfortably at room temperature before you start cooking it. Go back to bed.

• Get up at sensible time - the reward of having adult children - and make quite a hearty breakfast; for us it’s usually smoked salmon and scrambled eggs or frozen parathas with eggs and green chilli, though I have been known to make these really good waffles (which also freeze beautifully and are quite a nice thing to whip out for brekkers. You can make the dry mix in advance).

  I like a nice old movie at this point on the kitchen telly.

• Ask someone else to clear the breakfast away and load (and empty) the dishwasher. Turn the oven on.

• I brined my turkey for years and recommend it, plus it feels highly Christmassy. But you really can also treat the turkey like a big chicken: here is an excellent and really easy recipe and here is a friendly, hand-holding, even simpler one - no basting, even (I would still baste).

• If you have a Big Green Egg or other kind of ceramic egg-shaped grill, do the turkey in there. Not only does it remain fantastically moist and flavourful (for a turkey), but it frees up all the oven space. This is what I now do and the method I use is here.

• Turkeys are often really overcooked (see also sprouts, which I’ll get to). The easiest way to ensure optimal doneness is by using a meat thermometer, either a Thermapen or a little £5 one of the kind some butchers give you when you buy your bird. It’s metal and goes in the oven in the fattest part of the thigh. Your turkey is done when it reads 70 degrees, though check with your butcher or the label because it slightly depends on the type of turkey. The cooking is highly unlikely to take more than 3-3.5 hours max unless you’re feeding 30 people.

• THEN YOU NEED TO REST IT FOR AN HOUR, and longer is fine (less if it’s small, obviously). This is so important, otherwise it will be tough because the meat will be contracted (from the heat) rather than relaxed and, yes, moist, sorry to keep saying moist. All the juices will run out when you carve it, instead of reabsorbing and making the meat tender. So rest, rest, rest. Cover it loosely in foil with tea towels on top. It absolutely won’t get cold. It will be warm and your gravy will be hot - perfect. This is my main piece of turkey advice. It makes all the difference.

• Do the other oven things while the turkey is resting. It is hopeless to cram everything in and hope the potatoes cook properly. They won’t. Insufficiently crispy potatoes ruin Christmas, in my view.

• Sprouts. British people mistrust sprouts, but the rest of the world love them. This is because British people of several generations had grossly overboiled, sulphurous sprouts for decades and consider their flavour institutional (see also cabbage). But sprouts are delicious. I like them best either raw or roasted. This is a really fantastic, bright raw sprout salad with walnuts, lemon, anchovy and pecorino that is not only extremely nice to eat but provides welcome crunch. Here is a super-simple Mark Bitman recipe for roast sprouts. I can never tell if you can see those recipes without a sub, so I’ll paraphrase as it’s so easy: halve a pound of sprouts (these are his quantities, scale up as necessary). Heat enough olive oil to coat the bottom of your largest frying pan (they need to sit in one layer). Add the sprouts cut side down. Add five peeled cloves of garlic and some salt and pepper. Leave them alone until they’re brown on the bottom, at which point put them in the oven at 200 and give them a toss every five minutes or so until they’re brown and tender all over. Toss with 1tbs balsamic vinegar.

• You can play about with this recipe to your heart’s delight - try with honey and miso (no balsamic), or adding bits of pancetta, or chorizo, or lemon juice, or nuts, or herbs.

• Also nice: shredded sprouts stir-friend with pancetta and chestnuts.

• If you don’t want raw sprouts, try a red cabbage slaw rather than cooked red cabbage. My issue with Christmas dinner is that the textures are so similar that after a bit you just long for crunch. I now make a big plate of red chicory leaves with a punchy mustardy dressing (recipe in Skye McAlpine’s A Table for Friends), which I could absent-mindedly eat up all by myself. All the salad and dressing inspo a person could desire is at The Department of Salad.

• You don’t have to serve everything piping hot. We’ve already discussed the turkey. The vegetables can be warm or room temp. All that needs to be really hot is the gravy and the potatoes. Bearing this in mind really helps with not getting stressed out.

• Here’s how to carve so it looks profesh - I can’t say we always bother, but it does look nice.

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  I haven’t finished - loads more to come, and for example I wanted to mention Bee Wilson’s butter-poached carrots (in fact Raymond Blanc’s butter-poached carrots) which cook to miraculous perfection in, genuinely, FIVE MINUTES. I’ll post again in the week. There’s masses of time - this morning I got an email saying ‘have you left Christmas shopping to the last minute?’ It’s December 9! Last-minute is 5pm on the 24th.

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