Merry Christmas everyone! I hope that if you celebrate you had a great day and that Santa brought you everything you wished for! I got loads of kitchen stuff including a brilliantly coloured set of Laguiole cutlery, some silicone bakeware and the cutest mini ramekins. Now I just want to get in the kitchen and use some of it. Alas for that plan we are on the traditional post-Christmas turkey sandwich diet. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without it. One year my mum tried buying a smaller turkey so as not to have so much left over and we very nearly had a riot! Since for me a huge part of Christmas is the food I thought I’d do a little round up of what Christmas eating entails in our household.
Let’s start with the main event: The Turkey. We do our turkey very differently from everyone else I’ve met. We barbecue it. We have a big kettle barbecue and you put a really big roasting pan in the bottom to catch the drips and arrange the charcoal either side of that. Then you pop in the barbecue rack and once it’s up to temperature (Something about ash on the coals, who knows? That’s my dad’s job!) you pop in the turkey (ours is usually 15lbs) for 2 1/2 hours. Not only is this brilliantly fast but it keeps the oven free for veg and other things. That and my dad can escape outside when the relatives arrive!
My mother does obscene things with bacon and stuffing the night before and although putting the bacon between the skin and the breast is the most disgusting thing I have ever seen it is delicious! The stuffing this year was made with chestnuts grown by our friend in Italy so sort of homegrown there! Along with the turkey we serve the usual veg: carrots, brussel sprouts, mashed potatoes, roast potatoes, peas, sweetcorn and parsnips etc. As well as bread sauce, gravy, cranberry sauce and mayo for us kids.
For the starter mum usually does something fancy with salmon and other seafood but for us kids it’s the traditional prawn cocktail or nothing! Simple but always a pleasure. My sister doesn’t eat green things except spinach so she has hers on spinach and I have mine on lettuce. Other than that it’s prawns and seafood sauce. This year it was garnished with a home grown lemon slice as the lemon tree we’ve had in the conservatory for 20 years is finally producing fruit!
Pudding is always Christmas Pudding with cream and mum works very carefully to make sure there’s a 5p in each portion. We’d never think to deviate from the traditional Christmas meal as it’s Tradition. There’s something very comforting knowing that every year without fail this will be what you eat on December 25th. And since I’ve now gathered the recipes together here if mum gets struck by lightning or something then I can now step in and continue in her footsteps and there’s something extremely reassuring about that.
Anna in the kitchen 
Sounds like you had a nice Christmas with lots of good food! 😀
We really did. Hope you had a good time too!