Preparing The Ideal Christmas Dinner

As Christmas nears ever closer and the adverts become increasingly festive

, its hard to ignore all the preparation that goes into the winter celebration. Not only will you have to start hunting out the perfect Christmas presents and decorating your tree, theres also the Christmas dinner to think of.

For most people (once you pass the age where presents are everything!), the Christmas dinner is the most important part of the day. Taking hours to prepare, but only 30 minutes to destroy, it can be an exceptionally stressful affair.

Obviously the centrepiece of the whole dinner is the bird, traditionally turkey or goose. More recently, decadent roasts have been offer, such as the slightly terrifying-sounding turducken a de-boned chicken stuffed into a de-boned duck stuffed into a de-boned turkey. But were getting off-topic here. A true Christmas dinner should be a roasted bird, cooked to perfection with every single trimmings, so for this example, lets assume were having turkey.

The night before is preparation night get all of your chopping done and everything carefully pre-portioned. You can even start some chosen marinades or prepare time-sensitive items such as cranberry jelly. Also, take the turkey out of the fridge, remove any string and salt the skin chucking a refrigerated turkey straight into the oven can dry it out and decrease the flavour.

In the morning, set a number of timers for every aspect of the meal coat the turkey in a fine layer of butter, pepper and if youre like me, onion salt. I tend to put a couple of onions in the bird and leave it in the oven for a good half hour. After this time, start the veg!

My perfect dinner involves carrots, sprouts, mashed potato and roast potatoes. These can be boiled conventionally in separate pans in order to save the flavour (nothing worse than sprouty carrots!) The best potatoes should be carefully boiled in a pan of salted water save a third for mashing and use the rest for roasting. Ideally the roast potatoes should be fluffy within a crisped shell many insist on using goose fat, but I find it a bit too much.

Once your turkey is done to your liking, lift it clear of the juices (which can be used to make the gravy) and leave it to rest for 5 minutes or so whilst you finish the rest of the veg and transfer all components to the serving bowls.

And youre done! Now just to find someone to do the washing up!

by: James Daniel Fisher

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