It’s two days till Christmas and you don’t have time for this seven-minute read but you really need a break by now. So pour yourself a comforting cup of something, find a quiet corner and rest your weary bones. (You well know by now the benefits of resting meat.)
I’m going to tell you a story. It’s about the inspiration for this series of pre-Christmas cooking tips and recipes for the less-than-confident cook.
My mother suffered all her life from feelings of inadequacy in the kitchen. I didn’t realise how deeply it affected her until one Christmas Day, 40 years ago. I arrived a little late to find Mum bent over in a corner of her kitchen, hands nursing her stomach.
“Sorry I’m a bit late, Mum,” I said, taking my chef’s knives out of their wallet. “What needs doing?”
“I was having stomach pains but now you’re here, I’ll be fine,” she said.
Until that moment I hadn’t realised how deeply her lack of culinary confidence affected her, and I was inspired to create a booklet for her titled How to Enjoy Your Own Dinner Party.
The principles were simple: entertain within your means, financial and culinary. Less gourmet, more gormless.
Women like my mother didn’t want to wow guests: they just wanted to survive the experience. It’s difficult to explain how debilitating it is to be paralysed with fear at the thought of producing a “special occasion” meal.
This booklet changed my mother’s life. It helped her build enough confidence to produce one or two different dinner party menus. It included detailed timetables that specified every step from setting the table, to turning on the oven, to putting in one dish, then another so that everything was ready at the same time. It gave her the basic skills not just to survive but to enjoy her own dinner parties.
That year, Mum and I achieved a minor Christmas miracle. I wish the same for everyone out there who needs a little confidence boost in the kitchen this festive season.
Two days to go
Now is the time to dust off the fold-up trestle table in the garage and clear the living room furniture. If you have small children, tell them you’re going to “play restaurants” for the next couple of days. If they are 15-year-old-plus viewers of The Bear, tell them to grab a tea towel and some forks, call each other “chef” and practise their mise en place. (Make it clear the restaurant game doesn’t extend to in-house à la carte dining.)
Sort through the cutlery and polish the glassware. A silver cloth is best for the good cutlery, but a clean tea towel is just fine for stainless steel and glasses. If the glasses are too filthy and the task too daunting, consider putting them through the glassware cycle of that immaculate dishwasher you cleaned all those weeks ago. If you’re setting the table, turn the glasses upside down to avoid those pesky dust motes.
Bubble up your soda maker bottles and screw the lids on tightly. Not all the Christmas bubbly has to be alcoholic.
Iron the linen or break out the paper serviettes. This is a judgment-free zone. Remember how far you’ve come over the past four weeks and why you’re here.
One day to go
Wash and spin your salad greens, top and tail your beans, pod your peas. (Just kidding. Frozen peas are fine but I highly recommend you taste fresh peas at least once in your life.)
Pre-roast your vegetables (but not the potatoes): This refers to carrots, pumpkin, sweet potato, onion, tomatoes, capsicums and mushrooms – just about any vegetable you can think of. But not potatoes. They get their own section (and recipe) below.
If cooking for non-vegan guests and you’ve been saving the oil from the marinated feta in your fridge, drizzle the oil over your vegetables then roast them until they’re not quite done. Times will vary depending on the vegetable, but as a general rule, capsicum and mushrooms won’t take as long as the other veg, and pumpkin won’t take as long as sweet potato. Consider grouping vegetables with similar cooking times in their own microwave-safe baking dish. If you have oven- and microwave-proof serving dishes such as quiche or pie dishes, you can use them for both phases of the roasting and reduce the washing up.
Think about adding a head of garlic to your roast vegetables. Whenever the oven is on, I throw in a whole bulb drizzled with a little oil. Like toasting nuts, roasting garlic enhances the flavour and improves the texture. It turns the raw cloves into something nutty, squishy and standalone. When the garlic bulb is softened, remove the cloves and squeeze the flesh directly on to your roast vegetables or into a bowl of really good mayonnaise to make a subtler aioli, free of the bitterness of raw garlic.
Let the vegetables cool in their baking dish. I like to leave them on the kitchen bench overnight, covered with a clean tea towel and ready to reheat in the microwave the next day, in the same dish, if oven space is limited. The fridge is fine too if you have space, but they will need to be sealed with plastic wrap to stop them from absorbing fridge-y flavours.
Par-roast your perfect roast potatoes: Use daggy old brushed potatoes – nothing waxy or they won’t fluff up. I allow at least one large potato per person and they always get eaten. The recipe is below.
On the day
Do not pop the bubbly before the guests arrive, and even then, take it slowly. Keep your eyes on the prize: an absence of casualties due to either accidental poisoning or stress-induced biffo between guests. Once lunch is served, you can kick back with a glass or two and let everyone else deal with the mess.
Clean as you go if at all possible. Even if you have an army of volunteers for the post-meal cleaning, try to cut down on everyone’s workload. It’s Christmas after all.
Accept all offers of help for cleaning-up duty with a smile and a specific task, such as “rinse off the plates”, “wipe the table” or “pour Uncle Pete’s home-brew beer down the sink”.
Christmas is a notoriously difficult time: families are not always as depicted in The Waltons and blended families are rarely as successful as The Brady Bunch. For the recently bereaved or splintered family, clan gatherings take on unfamiliar shapes; empty places at the table emphasise the absence of loved ones. As hard as it might seem, maybe now is the time to try something new. The gentle tweaking of Christmas Day traditions can sometimes help to soften the sharp edges of holes left by missing loved ones. A change of venue can be a welcome diversion: Christmas at the beach. Christmas in the park. By a river.
The ideas presented over the past four weeks may have challenged some traditional ideas of what Christmas is all about, but their purpose has always been to keep it simple; to minimise the stress and maximise the fun.
And above all, to remember that Christmas is about spending time with loved ones, not stressing over the brandy sauce.
Perfect roast potatoes – recipe
Serves 8
10 large brushed potatoes
75-100ml olive oil
Preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan. Pour the olive oil into a deep baking tray and place in the oven for around 20 minutes to heat up the oil.
Meanwhile, peel and quarter the potatoes and place them in a large pot of cold water.
Cover the pot with a lid and bring the water to the boil. (Keep a close eye on this – if the lid isn’t glass you won’t easily notice when it reaches the boil.) Remove the lid and simmer for six to eight minutes (I usually fish out a couple of potato chunks and give them a test shake to check for “furriness”). Drain into a colander, then tip the potatoes back in the pot, cover with the lid and shake the pot until the potatoes have fluffed up but not disintegrated. (For this reason, don’t use a heavy cast iron pot unless you have exceptional upper body strength.)
Tip the fluffy potatoes on to the hot oil in the baking tray, taking care not to break them up or splatter oil over your Christmas outfit.
If roasting on the day, roast for around 45 minutes, turning the potatoes halfway through cooking to ensure they crisp up on both sides.
If par-roasting the day ahead, roast for about 25 minutes. Remove the tray from the oven and allow to cool, then cover with a clean tea towel and leave overnight. (If you must refrigerate them, be warned that plastic wrap – aside from being hazardous to the planet – will cause your perfect roast potatoes to become soggy and less than perfect.)
The next day, preheat the oven to 200C/180C fan. Roast the potatoes for 20 minutes to finish off the cooking process and crisp them up. (If you are serving these with roasted meat, this can easily be done while the meat is resting.)
