A truly great Christmas dinner is all about preparation and timing...
To make sure you have everything prepared for a wonderful day of festivities, Kimbers' will let you in on our secrets to cooking everything from turkey and veg to stuffing and gravy, even when you're bleary-eyed on Christmas morning!
Preparation Advice
#1. Figure out when you want to eat: 2pm is a good time, allowing friends and family to arrive and enjoy a few drinks and snacks before the main course is served.
#2. Make sure everything has already been prepared and is ready to go in the oven or on the hob. Preparing pretty much everything in advance makes things as stress-free and easy as possible. It also means your cooking helpers can check the timetable to make sure nothing has been forgotten.
#3. Cauliflower cheese and red cabbage should be made well in advance and put in the freezer until Christmas Eve - they're then ready to heat up on Christmas Day in either the oven or microwave.
#4. Christmas pudding takes around 8 hours to steam/boil and a further 2 hours on Christmas Day to heat through, so make sure you have your recipe sorted well in advance! The best way to steam Christmas pudding is to heat a boiling pan of water, keeping it at a low continuous simmer. The pudding itself should be put into a heatproof bowl and covered in foil. Put the bowl on top of an up-turned saucer inside the saucepan (so the bowl is not touching the bottom of the saucepan). Make sure the water comes roughly halfway up the bowl - put the saucepan lid on - and the steam inside the saucepan will cook the Christmas pud gently. It's important to keep topping the boiling water up in the saucepan, and not to let it boil dry, otherwise you'll have a broken/split bowl and a spoiled pudding. Christmas puds can also be shop bought of course and they can be steamed or boiled for a couple of hours depending on size or just put in the microwave to heat up in minutes.
#5. Stuff the turkey, cover in butter and bacon, then wrap in foil on Christmas Eve ready to go in the oven on Christmas Day.
#6. Peel and chop all vegetables - carrots, brussels, parsnips - and put them in the fridge on Christmas Eve. They can then be easily cooked and boiled according to your timetable.
#7. Peel and chop potatoes on Christmas Day, as they tend to go brown if left out of water.
#8. Invest in some disposable foil containers for parsnips and pigs in blankets to save room in the oven and cut down on that mammoth post-dinner washing up job!
Christmas Timetable
When it comes to Christmas dinner, you can be juggling many of different side components at once, so writing up a well thought out timetable with exact timings and instructions is a great way to make sure you stay on track with the precarious job of multitasking on the big day.
Serving time: approximately 14:00
14:35 Take out Christmas pudding and serve
