This is going to be an odd year for many. May be you’re going to be tackling a smaller Christmas Dinner for the first time. May be you’ve decided to go all out now you don’t have to trek round to Auntie Sue’s because it’s “what you always do”! May be you’ve never cooked more than a fried egg but think this is your time to shine!
Whatever your situation, I thought it may be timely to do a little example of how to do a low effort Christmas Dinner as guidance for those that need it. Remember, Christmas Dinner is just a roast dinner but with cranberry sauce and crackers! Don’t let the weight of expectations get you down, this can be as simple or as complicated a meal as you want to make it!
You can look at the Christmas tag for some older recipes and round ups that are more comprehensive but I wanted to highlight some really simple recipes here. Whether you’re on your own or just a smaller family gathering this should hit the spot!
Canapés
We like to have nibbles to tide us over from noon to 3pm when we have our Dinner. If you want to keep it super simple just grab some party food from the freezer section. These days they almost all cook at 180°C for around 15 minutes. Any leftovers are also great for grazing at!
Starter
In my family the Prawn Cocktail is king. (Well, for me it is, mum does try to do fancy smoked salmon thingies!) This is not only traditional but super simple. Finely sliced iceberg lettuce, prawns, cocktail sauce (Iceland’s is my favourite!) and a twist of lemon on top to look fancy. Less than 5 minutes and you’re done!
The Roast
Turkey is, of course, traditional and if you want to keep it super simple I recommend a frozen Turkey crown. They’re about £10 and you can pick one up in almost any supermarket.
However, a large roast chicken will also do very nicely! I love to do a one pot chicken dish where you simply get a Really Big Pot, put in new potatoes in the base, add your chicken (put some herbs, garlic and half a lemon in the cavity), and scatter with bacon lardons. Drizzle with a little olive oil and cook according to the time on the packet (or 25 minutes per lb + 20 minutes in 180°C oven) Add a cup of frozen peas 30 minutes before the end. This also works well in a slow cooker on high for 3 hours if you need the space in the oven or even if you don’t have an oven! You can find the more detailed recipe here.
A roast dinner is all about timing. If you figure out your timings then it’s plain sailing. You can prep all of your veg in advance, even the night before, so all you have to do on the day is put dishes in the oven on time or you can get the roast in and then do your veg prep. I have a post outlining some of the timings for veg here.
For example:
2 hours before: Roast In
45 minutes before: parsnips in (I like them crispy.)
30 minutes before: leeks in cream sauce, stuffing balls & pigs in blankets in
25 minutes before: Brussels sprouts and carrots in steamer on the hob. Check the sprouts after 15 minutes by poking with a sharp knife. They should be soft but not soggy.
Serving Time: Remove the chicken from the pot and place on a serving board. Use a slotted spoon to remove the potatoes and peas and bacon. You can make gravy with the juices. I explain how here.
Pudding
Christmas pudding is traditional, easily available from the supermarket, and I hate it. So I have a couple of other seasonal options that you can make the day before:
If you’re on your own do not let this stop you from having a full roast! The leftovers are the best bit! From this dinner I will be able to make sandwiches, soup, risotto and may be a few other dishes as takes my fancy! I basically won’t have to cook again for the next week, which is exactly how I like it!
For a dish that bears my name this took me an embarrassingly long time to get right. I would have potatoes swimming in butter or too crisp to eat without worrying about your fillings. These little stacked Pommes Anna finally hit that sweet spot between buttery and crispy and look fab for what is actually minimal effort. You can do a lot of the prep beforehand in assembling the stacks in the muffin tin if you want to prepare these in advance and then just pop them in the oven when ready so good for dinner parties!
6-8 new potatoes (waxy)
125g unsalted butter
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2 tsp sea salt
Cracked black pepper
Fresh thyme sprigs
– Heat the oven to gas mark 6.
– Use a mandolin or very sharp knife to slice the potatoes into 1/8” slices. Put in a small mixing bowl.
– Melt the butter in a small saucepan.
– Brush the insides of six muffin tins with melted butter.
– Place a small sprig of thyme in the bottom of each muffin cup.
– Add the garlic to the melted butter and remove the leaves from the remaining thyme sprigs and add those too.
– Gently heat until fragrant.
– Pour the butter over the potatoes. Add salt and pepper to season and toss gently.
– Place the sliced potatoes carefully in the muffin tins. You want to arrange them so that they will look good when turned out. Press down firmly in the centre.
– Pour the remaining butter over the potatoes.
– Cover the muffin tray with foil and bake in the oven for 35 minutes.
– Place a large oven dish over the muffin tin and carefully flip over so that the potato stacks come out intact. If any fall apart you can push them back into shape.
– Place the oven dish back in the oven and bake for another 10 minutes until the stacks look nice and crispy on the edges.
You will need Japanese Kewpie mayonnaise for this to taste right but it’s easy to get hold of, either a local Asian supermarket or Amazon will sort you out! I would also advise the chunkiest ham you can get, either go for trimmings or bake a ham joint and use some in this.
2 large floury potatoes
1/2 small tin Sweetcorn, drained
100g ham, chopped
1/2 medium carrot, julienned
1” cucumber, very finely sliced
6 tbsp kewpie mayonnaise
Pinch of salt
– Peel and chop up your potatoes and boil in a large pan of salted water for 20 minutes. Drain and return to the pan, let them air dry for 5 minutes.
– Mash the potatoes until smooth.
– Add your other ingredients and give a good stir through. Eyeball it, if you feel you want different proportions go for it! Alter it to your taste.
I’ve never actually eaten Saag Aloo before so I don’t really know how this recipe compares to others. What I can say is that I found it absolutely delicious and I will definitely be cooking it again!
I will especially be deploying it when my dad cooks curry. I love spices and the breadth of flavours they bring. I am not a fan of blowing your head of with heat! My Dad believes that the hotter a curry is the better. The potatoes and spinach in this Saag Aloo work to cut down on the spice level but still with a fantastic depth of flavour in its own right.
This recipe is a nice, easy, way of pepping up your potatoes a little. For very little effort you get a whole lot of flavour and an absolutely gorgeous texture you usually only get with twice cooked chips!
The smell of the roasted herbs is amazing too! These were cooked alongside a roast chicken and the whole kitchen smelt so good!
– Take a bag of new potatoes and place them in a nice oven dish.
– Drizzle with olive oil (3 tbsp at least, be generous!)
– Sprinkle with a pinch sea salt.
– Scatter with sprigs of fresh rosemary and thyme.
– Put in the top of the oven for 1 hour at gas mark 5.
– Done! Potatoes!
I’m all for oven chips. They’re great. Not much fat and the perfect vehicle for sauce. But you never eat an oven chip and go, “mmm”, do you? Sometimes you need a proper deep fried chip. Fat be damned! Tonight was one of those nights.
I was afraid of the deep fat frier for a long time. It’s boiling oil!!! But I faced up to my fears one night and discovered that actually, it’s not so scary after all. So long as you’re careful and don’t go sticking your fingers in or anything like that it’s not the hideously dangerous exercise I thought it might be! I’ll fry all sorts of things now where previously I’d have found a way round it so give it a go! You might just surprise yourself.
Allow about 2 average potatoes per person. Judge it by eye.
– Switch on the deep fat frier and allow it to get up to temperature.
– Peel the potatoes and cut into half, or thirds, dependent upon the size of your potato and then slice into chip sized chunks.
– Scatter into the frier to separate out the slices. If you have more chips than cover the bottom of the basket then do this in batches.
– Lower the basket into the oil, shut the lid and cook for 6 minutes.
– Take out and put in a warm dish lined with kitchen paper and keep warm. Cook the next batch and do the same then set aside while you cook the rest of the meal.
– Just before you are ready to serve tip the chips back into the fryer in one batch and fry for another 2 minutes.
– Tip back into a warm, lined bowl and serve. I always serve with a sprinkle of ground salt but if you’d rather add salt at the table then do so.
I love this dish. It’s much more fiddly than simply steaming some potatoes it’s true but it’s such a delicious side dish that I think it’s well worth the effort. I first had this only a year or two ago in France and it was the high point of possibly the best meal of my life. I have to apologise for this being another recipe which really needs specialist bits and bobs but I’ve had the mandoline out and I’m in love with another kitchen gadget! It’s magic, I was so impressed with how easy it made slicing everything up so thinly. I may even have to try making my own crisps. I’ve also made this dish with celeriac recently and I have to recommend that as an excellent way to eat it. I hate celery with a passion, it’s one of the Five Foods of Doom that I will not eat, so I was a bit worried but celeriac dauphinoise was a delicious introduction to the vegetable and not celery-y at all. The creamyness of this dish goes very well with beef, I’ve had it with steak, boeuf bourguignon and, tonight, roast beef.
Serves 4 generously
approx 3 large potatoes (Use your head and cater for how big a dish you want to fill and how big your tatties are.)
300ml cream
50g butter
splash of milk
2 cloves garlic, very finely sliced (I used a mini mandoline, also very useful!)
2 tsp thyme leaves
– First peel your potatoes and slice finely, preferably with a mandoline if not be careful!
– Heat the cream, butter and milk in a pan until piping hot but not boiling.
– Grease an oven proof dish and pour in a shallow layer of cream.
– Lay potato slices on top of this, scatter with a few garlic slices, sprinkle with a bit of thyme and season with salt and pepper.
– Spoon more cream over this then another layer of potatoes on top, scatter with garlic and thyme, season and repeat until you reach the top of your dish or run out of potatoes. (I try to keep back enough good slices to make the top layer aesthetically pleasing and bury the tatty bits in the middle.)
– If you have any cream left pour this on top.
– Cook in the oven at gas mark 7 for an hour, placing foil on top to prevent burning half way through.
– Test with a sharp knife to see if it’s cooked through, there should be little to no resistance.
What is a roast without vegetables? I love vegetables!
I usually steam most of my veg. If you don’t have a steamer I very much recommend getting one. I use mine a lot for both veg and especially for Japanese foods. I even have a microwave steamer, technically for doing rice and pasta, that I use for making individual portions although the timings are very different for that. If, however, you don’t have one then you can improvise with a sieve and a pan.
These are guidelines more than anything, if you cut your veg bigger than I do or choose larger potatoes then they’ll take longer to cook. Test before serving by poking with a sharp knife. The knife should slip easily through the vegetable if it’s cooked.
New Potatoes – 25 minutes Brussel Sprouts – 20 minutes Carrot slices – 20 minutes Corn on the cob – 10 minutes Asparagus – 10 minutes Brocolli – 7 minutes Edamame in pods – 5 minutes
I like to stirfry courgette slices in a little butter or olive oil, they take about 10 minutes on a low to medium heat. They’re cooked when they start to go soft and a bit see through.
Sweetcorn from a tin is best done in the microwave. Drain, tip into a dish with a small knob of butter, cover and microwave for 2 minutes.
Leeks in Creamy Sauce
2 leeks
a knob of butter
3 tbsp corn flour
1 pint milk
– Clean, if necessary, and horizontally slice your leeks.
– Put them in a microwaveable dish with a good splash of water (about 5mm in the base is good) and a pinch of salt.
– Cover and microwave for 7 minutes.
– In the meantime make a white sauce by melting the butter in a heavy bottomed pan and whisking in the cornflour to make a paste.
– Remove the pan from the heat and add the milk and a pinch of salt.
– Place the pan back on the heat and whisk constantly until the sauce thickens.
– Drain any remaining water from the leeks and then pour the white sauce over the leeks.
– Place in the oven to keep warm until serving.
Braised Cabbage
Cabbage, any colour. I prefer white.
a knob of butter
a splash of water
– Chop or tear the cabbage into small pieces.
– Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan, add the cabbage and sprinkle with salt.
– Stir until the cabbage is nicely coated with butter and starts to ‘pop’.
– Add the water, cover and keep on a medium heat until the water is absorbed and the cabbage tender. When it is cooked it will have become ever so slightly transparent.
Hi, I'm Anna and this is what's going on in my kitchen and growing in my garden.
Everything you see here is how it looked as I cooked and ate it. I don't like to make things too fussy. I want you to know that if you try one of my recipes what you see is what you'll get.
Don't forget to leave a comment, I love to know what you're thinking and if you do try out a recipe then let me know how it worked for you. Happy cooking!
Anna in the kitchen 