12 Tips to get ahead for Christmas Dinner

Christmas starts here

12 Tips to get ahead for Christmas Dinner

Let’s face it we’d rather be enjoying a glass of wine & the Christmas Day festivities, than boiling Brussels sprouts and opening the oven more often than the kids say ‘is dinner ready’. So we’ve compiled a Christmas dinner cheat sheet to help you get ahead!

Christmas dinner preparation shouldn’t be a stressful process - after all we have it just once a year. So we’ve compiled some handy tips that can help you enjoy preparing the masterpiece without compromising on serving a great dinner for your guests.

  1. Firstly, start the day with a bacon sandwich or freshly baked croissant. If you’re planning on having some champagne throughout the day you’ll need to prepare your stomach so that dinner doesn’t get way laid.
  2. Now to the actual dinner prep...Peel your veg the day before, all of them. Store them in the fridge overnight and if they tend to go brown, leave them in salted water.
  3. Roast all of your veg. Unless your cooking it with the turkey then roast it the day before, meaning you only need to reheat it the next day. An alternative to this would be to parboil all of the vegetables the day before meaning you only need to give them a quick roast on the day.
  4. Avoid boiling your vegetables, unless you’re going to blanche them or you’ll find that your veg will be over cooked after you’ve reheated them on the day.
  5. Lay the table the day before! It means you’re not rushing and you can enjoy creating a beautiful table setting. 
  6. Check what pans you have, and make sure you know what can fit in the oven together and what can’t. This will help you work out what veges need to go on what trays. We’ve made this mistake many seasons in our home, resulting in a juggling act of swapping pans around.
  7. Less really is more! You’ve only got a limited amount of oven space, so when it comes to keeping things hot you don’t want to become the next circus juggler rotating 8 trays in and out of the oven.
  8. Make your stuffing in advance, even bake it ready to go. If you like using the juice of turkey in your stuffing, you could always use the juice of a chicken roast from a weeknight dinner leading up to Christmas. Ps. Don’t be afraid to use a pre mix and then add to it.
  9. If you’ve got lots of guests to feed purchase a rolled and deboned turkey - they’re still delicious and easy to carve. You can cook two of these in the same space as one whole turkey. 
  10. If you’re hosting a crowd, ask them to bring dessert or the wine, you don’t want any unexpected surprises to warm up or squeeze in the oven. It also means it’s a whole part of the dinner that you can forget about.
  11. Why not recruit some kitchen elves to help! Plan in advance what each person can do to ensure no unwanted stress is added.
  12. Never apologise for the food. Is the roast a little more done than you’d like? Chances are you’re the only one who will even notice... just serve a little extra gravy on the side.