I'd be lying if I said I didn't get disproportionately excited about christmas and christmas food. I've been hosting xmas at my house for 3 years and cooking the food for several years prior to that, having inherited the duty due to my enthusiasm for the task. I haven't had any disasters but I don't think anyone would disagree if I said that each year I'm getting a bit better at it.
The ideal is to get the entire meal to the table, hot, before 3pm and without a single frustrated outburst or stress-induced teary argument. Difficult, but not impossible.
This post is to tie together all the other ones, each relating to an element of xmas dinner or xmas in general. You might think there are a few things missing, each family has their own traditional accompaniments, but partly that's because we had a small scale xmas this year so I didn't bother with stuffing or redcurrant sauce. I bought the pigs-in-blankets ready made too.
Spicy Glazed Ham
Roast Goose
Rich Gravy
Perfect Roast Potatoes
Bread Sauce
Vegetables
Trifle
Bubble and Squeak
I've got my inspiration from various cookbooks, from my family, friends and just from doing it year on year. Below is a list of the books I've turned to time and again in recent Christmasses:
Nigella Christmas ~ Nigella Lawson
The Good Housekeeping Cookbook (1998)
Sunday Lunch ~ Gordon Ramsay
Mmm, gravy. You could use granules. You could use a pot or sachet from the supermarket. You could rely on deglazing the pan with stock made from a cube. But this is christmas and the absolute best thing to have on the table is lots and lots of rich, deeply flavoured, piping hot gravy, made from scratch (and from happy birds).
Hopefully, you've got some giblets from your goose / chicken / turkey / other christmas birdie. Take the liver out and put aside, you can eat it separately pan fried on toast but it makes gravy bitter so don't include it (it looks like this).
Along with the giblets, put a few chicken wings, necks or even just old carcasses, into a large saucepan. Most butchers will sell you wings and necks for gravy, abel and cole also sells them, I also keep a load of bones in the freezer for use in stocks.
To these, add a quartered onion, a couple of bay leaves, some parsley stalks, a couple of broken carrots, a couple of broken celery sticks and about 10 peppercorns. Cover with cold water (a couple of pints / a litre) and pop on the hob. Bring to the boil then turn down and simmer for a good couple of hours. Keep tasting it, and don't take it off the heat until it has reduced down and has a good flavour (remembering that there's no salt in it yet though, so don't expect it to taste "finished").
Strain it into a jug and either skim off the fat or use a fat separator jug - I found one in the kleeneze catalogue and found it really useful. Leave it to cool and pop in the fridge, covered with clingfilm, until ready to make your gravy.
When you get your bird out of the oven and put it aside to rest, pop the roasting tray on the hob and add the stock to it (if it's been in the fridge it will be jellified, that's a good thing!). To this add a slosh of wine (red or white, your choice) and a spoonful of redcurrant jelly. Get it bubbling and burn off the booze, scraping the bottom of the tin to get all the caramelised bird juices into the mix. Result = awesome gravy.
Serve piping hot in a really twee gravy boat.
Go to the Christmas Dinner (2011) post
This is properly entitled "big fat roast dinner for lazy, lardy layabouts". At the very least the trimmings deserve more of a mention: rosemary and pancetta wrapped pheasant with roast chestnuts, curly kale and roast potato cubes. That was a bit too long for the title though!
It sounds a bit complicated and lengthy to make but it really isn't, it didn't even take a full hour.
First of all take some pheasant breasts (1-2 per person depending on appetite; I had one, my husband had two) and pat clean with some kitchen roll. Lay a small sprig of rosemary on top of each one and wrap it in a couple of slices of pancetta. Place in a small roasting tray with some oil and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Cover with foil and leave to one side while the oven preheats to 200 degrees C.
Boil up some small potatoes until mostly cooked but still firm in the middle. Drain and cut them into little cubes. Add to another small baking tray that has been lined with greaseproof paper. Drizzle some oil over and season with salt and pepper. If you like (and I do) sprinkle some finely chopped pancetta in as well. Mix until the potato cubes are coated with the oil.
When the oven is hot bung both trays in together and leave be for 15-20 minutes.
In the meantime you can decant your chestnuts * onto a third small baking tray and tear up your kale into a saucepan. If you find any little green caterpillars you could pop them into the garden with a complementary kale dinner of their own, as we did - that was a very narrow escape for a cabbage white butterfly-to-be. If your garden is full of brassicas though you might not - it depends on your take of these things!
After the 15-odd minute roast, remove the foil off the pheasant breasts and pop the chestnuts in on the shelf below. Cook for a further few minutes until the pancetta has crisped up.
Turn the oven off, but leave the potatoes and chestnuts in there. Put the pheasant breasts onto a warm plate and re-cover with foil, leave to rest while you sort out the gravy and briefly cook the kale, with a sparing amount of hot water, until tender.
To make the gravy just pop the roasting tray the pheasants were in onto a medium heat with a slosh of red wine, a dollop of redcurrant jelly and a small amount of cornflour. Scrape and stir and let it bubble away until it tastes good and has the right consistency.
* You can get pre-cooked and peeled chestnuts from, as far as I'm aware, abel & cole, waitrose and sainsburys. The brands I know are Organico and Gourmet Merchant.
I used to hate liver, really really hate it. I think a lot of people do. The taste and texture of overcooked liver, as often served in schools or by grandparents, is not dissimilar to that of soggy cardboard marinated in angostura bitters.
Properly cooked liver is brilliant though. Even high-welfare organic offal is cheap as chips and, cooked with care, is tender, juicy and delicious. It's also full of vitamin a, iron and vitamin c.
There are three different kinds of (non-poultry) liver that you can commonly get hold of: pig's, lamb's and calves'. I've had all three and they all cook up a treat, simply prepared as in this recipe.
However, a little note on buying liver... organic liver generally is fine in most cases but be cautious about where you get calves liver from. Make absolutely sure it hasn't come from veal calves whose treatment you wouldn't want to subsidise. Where possible, I'd look for liver from British raised pink or "rose" veal calves. I'll post more on this, rather touchy, subject in the future when I have time to do it justice.
Thickly slice a couple of onions, fry them up until really nice and soft and put them to one side. Make up your gravy using some stock thickened with cornflour and enhanced with a little red wine and redcurrant jelly.
Slice up the liver and fry for literally a minute or so on each side. Be really, really careful not to overcook it, you just want it tender and barely cooked through.
Basic colcannon is just mashed potato with cabbage in. I had leftovers from dinner the night before, so I just mashed them up, added a bit of seasoning and butter and heated them through.
The mash goes first on the plate, then the liver, onions and finally the gravy. Fabulous old-style food at its best.
The weather recently has put me off fresh, lettucy salads so when I finalised my A&C order for this week, I opted to skip the little gem lettuces - alas the substitute was broccoli.
There are some vegetables I find easier to cook with than others, I simply have more ideas for what to do with them. The ones I feel I'm limited in inspiration for include broccoli, or more accurately calabrese. I don't hate it, not at all, I just find it hard to incorporate into my daily made-up recipes. Maybe that's because it has quite a strong flavour, can be easy to over or undercook and the texture doesn't always marry well with other ingredients.
I did have an idea this time though, as I'd ordered a lovely chicken to be roasted on Sunday. Remember my butternut yorkshire? No, probably not, but the point is that I made a little mental leap, from toad in the hole, to butternut squash in the hole, to a giant yorkshire pudding filled with broccoli. Tastes better than it sounds, trust me.
Ok, so first raise your chicken. I meant to write roast just then but, actually, raising the chicken is a really good point so that's a freudian slip worth expanding on. Crappily treated chicken should make people feel bad, not just as they buy it (thus fueling the horrific cut-price poultry industry) but also as they eat it: dry, bland, chewy and stuffed full of unneccessary additives.
Once you have a chicken which led a life that you aren't ashamed of, then you can roast it. I don't remember where I picked up this tip, but stuffing the chicken's cavity with a lightly microwaved peirced onion or lemon helps to keep it beautifully moist.
I do know where I picked up my other tricks though: my Mum. She taught me to separate the skin and stuff the space in between with garlic, herbs and butter. She also taught me to cook the chicken upside down for all but the last thirty minutes of cooking, ensuring that you get wonderful, juicy meat and a nice crispy skin as well.
So, prepare your chicken and pop it in to roast upside down. If you got giblets with the bird, pop them in a saucepan with a couple of bay leaves, peppercorns, carrot, onion and celery with a litre of water, turn the heat on and leave it to simmer away into a nice gravy base.
Make up your batter: a teacup of flour, a teacup of milk, a pinch of salt and one or two eggs depending on your tastes. Make a paste with the egg, a little milk and the flour first, then make it into a batter by adding the rest of the milk slowly. Leave it be for a while, as resting makes better batter!
After the chicken is about half done, pop two companion trays in with it. One with oil in - to heat it up so that the yorkshire will sizzle - and the other one lined with greaseproof paper, for the roasties.
I usually cut my potatoes into thirds if they are quite large potatoes, or on the diagonal if they are small ones. I left the skins on because I like them. This method came to me from the lovely Chef Darius: drop them into vigorously boiling, salted water for literally just 2 minutes then drain. I usually shake them in the pan to scuff them up a bit too.
When there's only about half an hour left, heat up some oil in a frying pan until really hot. Add the potatoes to the hot oil and turn them over in it until utterly coated. Then turn your chicken right side up and salt the skin. Add the potatoes and oil to the greaseproof paper tin, mix small broccoli florets to the batter and pop your yorkshire into the other one. Thanks Darius!
I also had some sweetcorn this week, so I put them into a foil parcel with butter, salt and pepper and shoved them in the oven too.
At this point, it's worth going for a nice sit down in the living room for half an hour. Preferably get someone else to lay the table and turn the spuds after fifteen minutes, if not you'll have to do it and that's no way to relax.
After the last half an hour, take the chicken out and let it rest on the side for 10-15 minutes while you make up the gravy. Leave the yorkshire and sweetcorn in the oven, but turn it off so it's just kept warm, not cooking. Put the spuds on kitchen towel to drain off some of the oil.
Gravy is easy, add some of the stock you made earlier (or just boiling water) to the chicken tray, sat over a low hob. Stir and scrape vigorously to get all of the residue off the pan, the water should turn a beautiful gravy colour. At this point, if you can be bothered, you can add pre-fried onions and garlic or cornflour for thickening. None of that is necessary though, I didn't and it tasted wonderful anyway.
Serve up with great aplomb and gorge yourself silly, safe in the knowlege that at least the broccoli is good for you.
I was feeling a bit down so when I got home from work my lovely husband offered me a chinese takeaway. Hot and sour soup, pancake rolls, monks vegetables, oooh lots of my favourite things danced before my eyes for a moment. And then I thought about the lovely lamb joint in the fridge, and the heart-pounding, insomnia-inducing after effects of MSG overload... so I changed my mind...
Once I'd stopped dithering I could turn my mind to how easy dinner would be if I just got on with it. I plonked the lamb in a baking tray, made slits with a knife and stuffed the poor beastie with garlic and rosemary. Salt, pepper and olive oil to coat and straight in the oven at 180 degrees, covered in foil.
Got the hubby to scrub the potatoes (I hate that job!) and put them in a pot with some torn up mint from the garden. I picked some thyme too, and prepared the leeks with some extra garlic.
Then I plonked myself on the sofa to watch Modern Family and the Simpsons to cheer myself up. By the end of the Simpsons the lamb had been in the oven for about an hour, so it was time to take the foil off the lamb and put the potatoes on to cook in boiling water.
Then I heated up a frying pan with some oil, added the garlic and then the leeks and thyme, just to brown a little bit. Then, the happy sizzling noise of a glass of white wine, left until almost all of it has boiled away, then a pint of veg stock and the lid on to let them braise.
Twenty minutes later, the lamb came out of the oven to rest - it does make a difference you know, I used to think it was a load of baloney but it isn't. And it gives you just enough time to stick the pan on the hob, add a bit of water and make some gravy. Add the broth from the leeks too, with the garlic and thyme it just works beautifully.
Lamb, minted jersey royals and braised leeks with gravy. Not bad at all. I didn't miss having a takeaway that's for sure.
Spicy Glazed Ham 
