It's Christmas!

Christmas dinner.  Everyone has an opinion.  Sprouts or not?  Where to go, who's going to cook?  Love or loathe the whole thing?  I am firmly in the "love" camp and I had been looking forward to cooking Christmas dinner and planning it for quite some time, in fact for over a month, on and off.  I've only cooked Christmas dinner twice before, once for two (with my first husband) and once for eleven when I was expecting my son and at the stage of pregnancy where you have the burst of energy and feel like superwoman for a short while.  I had an issue of delicious magazine with a very inspirational festive menu and during a family dinner at my brother-in-law's house suddenly thought "Why not?" and invited everyone on the husband's side of the family for Christmas dinner.  My father-in-law didn't come in the end but there were thirteen of us: Mother-in-law, three brothers-in-law, two sisters-in-law, one sister-in-law's Mum, two nieces, plus husband, daughter, son and me.  We couldn't seat everyone in one room so we had one table in the kitchen diner and one in the conservatory. It was also the one day in the year where I used both my ovens.  The smaller one is usually only a glorified baking tray cupboard.

The large number of guests in a relatively small house dictated that we had to do a fair amount of borrowing: some folding tables and chairs from my parents, extra cutlery, salt and pepper grinders, crockery, serving dishes and pans from mother-in-law. We bought lots of new wine glasses when we saw a special offer too as we didn't have enough matching ones.

In the end it was pretty much a complete triumph, the secret being I didn't do it all myself.  I accepted all offers of help, and it paid off.  The only thing that really went wrong was that I was so busy cooking and having such a great time that I forgot to take photos for this blog, so there aren't as many photos as I'd like!  So as the smell of turkey stock wafts through the air, I'll take you through it..

Starting with festive drinks.  While at the Good Food Show, husband and I had discovered The King's Ginger, a gorgeous ginger liqueuer discussed  in my previous post, and mixed with a glass of cava it became a "Ginger Royale" and was beautiful. In fact ginger somehow ended up being a recurring theme throughout the meal so it was just as well everybody liked it.  I also mixed cava with Chambord (a raspberry based liqueuer) and added a frozen raspberry.  The main course was accompanied by red or white wine, there was a dessert wine (2007 Domaine de Grange Neuve Monbazillac) for later on, and port and whiskey with the cheeseboard. We forgot about the chilli vodka in the freezer though, which was probably a good thing.  And a cup of peppermint tea was essential for me to aid digestion!

There were the usual olives, crisps, etc and sister-in-law M (a trained chef and fellow foodie) had made seasonally spiced nuts, sausage & sage plamiers - which were delicious bite sized pastry morsels - also figs and goats cheese wrapped in prosciutto; and smoked salmon triangles.  Everyone enjoyed these while the main event came together.

On counting afterwards the main course had thirteen components!!  The turkey was not an expensive one but simply a supermarket frozen bird, but it was excellent value for money.  It weighed about seven and a half kilos and took a couple of days to defrost in a bucket in a cool garage.  I think it's what you do with a turkey that decides the flavour, rather than it's origins.  Rick Stein once failed in attempt to distinguish between an expensive turkey and a cheap one by taste alone, so I think that says a lot.

I stuffed the neck end of the turkey with a stuffing made with dried cultivated mushrooms soaked in boiling water for twenty minutes (the soaking water being kept to add to the gravy), good quality sausagemeat from sausages we had as part of a half pig purchase earlier in the year, pork mince, torn up sourdough bread, chopped rosemary from the garden, onion and garlic softened in butter, with some grated parmesan and seasoning - all bound together with an egg yolk. I put two halves of an orange in the body cavity together with more rosemary and bay leaves from the garden, rubbed the outside with softened butter and covered the breast with rashers of streaky bacon.  The turkey was roasted in a very deep and thick foil tray (I washed it and recycled it afterwards) on top of a large roasting tray borrowed from Mum.  It only just went in the oven widthwise.  It was roasted for three hours covered with foil, plus another 50 minutes with the foil removed, and then rested for an hour and a quarter while the roast potates were cooked.  Sister-in-law M kindly carved it for me as there was so much going on at the dishing it up stage.  That was the time I had my usual moment of panic and wanted to run away and hide under the duvet, but I did some deep breathing and told myself to get on with it!   Pigs in blankets were brought ready cooked by sister-in-law M's Mum and warmed up in oven number two.

 I didn't get a photo of the intact turkey...

The gravy was the secret of alchemy!  I did partially cheat with two Knorr "gravy pots", some boiling water, the mushroom soaking water which had been left in a jar for a couple of days so that all the gritty bits had setled out, the juices from the turkey tin after the fat had been skimmed off, a splosh of red wine, and some Worcestershire sauce. The resulting mixture was thickened with cornflour in cold water.

The gammon was a biggish unsmoked joint, roasted with a glaze brushed on for the last 45 minutes of the cooking time.  The idea was from a Sainsbury's recipe card from several years ago.  The glaze was a mixture of the grated zest of eight clementines, clementine juice, chopped stem ginger from a jar, some of the ginger syrup and some mustard seeds.  The zested clementines were halved and added to the roasting dish too.  The gammon was sliced and served cold.

The roast potatoes were the husband's domain.  He always maintains his roasties are better than mine and he's right.  He only cuts them up if they are very big, apparently size does matter.  They were parboiled, roughed up  by shaking the pan and roasted for a good hour in goose fat which was heated up for ten minutes first in a hot oven.  As the turkey rested for so long, there was plenty of time to turn up the main oven and cook them. Before roasting he sprinkled them with cornish sea salt and some less coarse salt flavoured with rosemary.  The end result was spectacularly good, very crisp and crunchy and the outside and a beautiful golden colour and fluffy on the inside.  He used two and a half kilos of potatoes and there was only one potato left over.

Vegetables!  All our family LOVE Brussels sprouts, in fact they are my husband's favourite vegetable and I could get my son to eat unfamiliar foods when he was a baby by mixing chopped sprouts in with them.  Christmas dinner just wouldn't be Christmas dinner without sprouts in my opinion.  I blanched the sprouts until just done, then mixed them with roasted carrots, browned butter and toasted halved macadamia nuts.  Red cabbage was provided pre-cooked by sister-in-law M and microwaved to heat it up.

I've found roast parsnips always get burnt somehow, and I wanted to try a new way with them, so I made a puree of softened shallots and parsnips cooked in milk with ground ginger.  This was done in advance and reheated in a pan.  There was also the traditional bread sauce with nutmeg, made by sister-in-law M's Mum and brought in her slow cooker which I plugged in in the conservatory. Sister-in-law M had made proper cranberry sauce too.

Another new accompaniment recipe from delicious magazine was caramelised pears and chestnuts.  Chopped onions were softened and set aside, then peeled quartered pears cooked in butter and sugar until golden and set aside.  Then pre cooked chestnuts were toasted in foaming butter with thyme (from the garden) and salt, and all the ingredients were combined, adding a squeeze of lemon juice, and put in an overproof dish ready to be reheated for twenty minutes in the oven prior to serving.

And that was the main course!  It all came together and nothing got forgotten.  I have memories of Christmas dinners where dishes have been found in the microwave at teatime...  After all that we needed a loooong pause before the large selection of puddings, so we did some present opening and had a poetry competition between courses.  I won! But that's another story.

For afters on Christmas day I think you have to have a Christmas pudding and you have to have a trifle.  Mother-in-law had made a really top notch and not at all heavy Christmas pud, which she had cooked at her house and brought snuggled up in a towel.  It was put to gently re heat in a pan of water between courses, and served with brandy butter made by sister-in-law M's Mum which tasted as if it had an entire barrel of brandy in, it fairly took your breath away but was very good.  There was cream too if you wanted.

I had also designed a Black Forest Trifle, inspired by the classic gateau.  I started with some chocolate cake trimmings I had in the freezer and soaked them in creme de cacao and kirsch from the  jars of cherries in kirsch I had tried so hard to source (as previous posts testify). Then came a layer of cherries in kirsch and blackcurrant jelly. Next a layer of chocolate custard. I was going to cheat and buy it ready made but I could only get normal custard so I melted some dark choloate and mixed it in.  Then came a layer of  halved red grapes. Then whipped cream with creme de cacao in, another layer of cherries in kirsch and topped with more whipped cream, gleaming with edible silver shimmer spray and chocolate stars.

Sister-in-law M had made a very very chocolatey chocolate log, Mother-in-law had made mince pies and a Christmas cake which my son had helped with on Christmas Eve, it was her very thoughtful idea to remove him from the house for the final day of preparations as a six year old helper is not always all that helpful!

I had made coffee cream macaroons which were favourably received as always.  Brother-in-law R and sister-in-law V had brought a luxury cheese hamper with gourmet crackers, grapes, the Wookey Hole cheddar, apparently voted the best cheese in the world, all manner of other lovely cheeses and wild boar pate.  They had also brought a selection of hot chilli sauces (as are enjoyed by many members of our family) and there followed a chilli sauce tasting session.  Others had got to the having-a-nice-cup-of-tea stage.

The whole thing took from about 11am to about 7pm and was so relaxed and happy, even the clearing up was a case of pottering about, running the dishwasher and doing some more when you felt like it.  No one felt dumped on, everyone helped and although looking back it WAS a lot of work, I really, really enjoyed myself.

I couldn't have done it without a great deal of planning and organisation.  I'm a great one for lists and notes, and I had bro-in-law T to help me for two (quite relaxed) days of prep.  We didn't get stressed or feel rushed at all.  On day one, Sunday 23rd, we cooked the gammon, made the stuffing, made the pear and chestnut dish, made the parsnip puree and prepped the sprouts.  And made a sausage casserole for dinner.  On day two, Christmas Eve, we spent the morning making the trifle and the macaroons, and in the afternoon we prepped the carrots, toasted the macadamia nuts, stuffed and baconed the turkey and made a few things for an evening meal - three pizzas, sticky cranberry sausages and stilton puffs.  We also laid the tables, sorted crockery, cutlery, candles, crackers and chairs.  All this preparation enabled Christmas morning to be very chilled.  All there was to do was put the turkey in the oven at the planned time, slice the gammon, peel and parboil the potatoes and wait for the other dishes to arrive...

All that remains for me is to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, I feel a post about using up the Christmas leftovers coming on soon...

Thank you for reading,

Caroline :-)