De-stress your Sunday

I have been home from France for three weeks and somehow, I have managed to eat five roast dinners in that time. I think that’s something of a personal record.

The thing I find fascinating about roast dinners is how much they vary from family to family, given that they are all essentially the same thing: meat, potatoes and vegetables. Some families will only ever serve Yorkshire Puddings with beef, whereas others consider it a staple of every Sunday roast. Some people only cook chicken, while others would always choose to cook lamb. Potatoes are mashed, or roasted, or boiled – or, if you’re Irish, all three. Red sauce is either ketchup or redcurrant jelly or sometimes even cranberry sauce. Sometimes broccoli is the vegetable that can always be found on the table, in other houses, it’s carrot and parsnip.

While I don’t advocate a pub chain’s equivalent of a roast dinner over one that your mum or grandmother has made (they can never, ever cook vegetables without making them taste vaguely school dinners-y); there is something quite pleasing in that fundamentally, there is no difference between that kind of a roast and the elaborate affair that is the Christmas dinner.

Which is why I can never understand why there is always so much fuss made over how difficult the Christmas meal is to make. It’s not as if we Brits are inexperienced when it comes to roasting meat and serving it with potatoes and vegetables – a fair few of us do that every weekend. But for some reason, Christmas dinner is meant to be:

a.     incredibly stressful and demanding

b.     more complicated than any other meal you could make and

c.      a total disaster from start to finish.

My mother has always approached Christmas dinner like she would any Sunday roast. “The only difference is that the turkey’s bigger, because for some reason we think that we need three times more turkey for this particular roast dinner than we would any other Sunday,” she said to me this Christmas. At the risk of making my mother sound as if she doesn’t do Christmas dinner properly, I have to say, she takes a fairly relaxed approach to making Christmas dinner. Which is probably why she insists on cooking it for the family every year and would possibly have a bit of a wobbly if someone else volunteered for the task.

Mum insists that there are five core principles when it comes to making a roast – whether it’s a typical Sunday roast or Christmas dinner.

1.     Make your life easier by preparing vegetables ahead of time.

Prepare the vegetables or potatoes as early as you feel you can get away with. Peeling carrots, parsnips and potatoes on Christmas Eve has become as much a tradition for our family as me going to Midnight Mass and sneaking in with the neighbour for a cheeky glass of red after the service.

Even when it’s not Christmas, get ahead with doing the vegetable prep. Are your carrots really going to suffer for sitting in a saucepan full of water for a couple of hours before you need them? Cook the cauliflower before you need to make the white sauce – you don’t need to faff with making sure that’s not overcooked and that the white sauce is smooth, too. Do the vegetables, then do the sauce. It’s going in the oven anyway.

2.     The microwave is your friend.

Seriously. Put aside any snobbish misconceptions you may have. Make your carrot and parsnip, mash them, and then when everyone descends for dinner just put the bowl in a microwave to reheat it. It’ll not ruin them. Honest. If it’s good enough for a whole wealth of celebrity chefs, it’s good enough for you and your Sunday roast.

3.     Timing is everything.

Work out how much time your chicken (or turkey or lamb or beef) is going to take and plan accordingly. If you’ve prepared the vegetables ahead of time and aren’t frightened to use the microwave, it’s okay to just swan into the kitchen every so often and give your veggies a gentle prod.

4.     Let the meat rest before you carve it.

It’s much easier and you don’t end up with some bits that are the size of house bricks and others that are thinner than the slices of Tesco Value wafer-thin ham.

5.     Don’t be a Sunday roast martyr.

There is nothing more annoying than to be really enjoying a meal someone’s cooked for you, making all the appropriate ‘yummy’ noises whilst they sit and prod at their dinner, complaining about how much effort it took and how the honey-roast parsnips just taste like nothing. It doesn’t half put you off complimenting the meals – and then the cook gets all huffy because nobody appreciates the food.

The bottom line is, Sunday dinners are not complicated. Christmas dinners are not complicated. All it takes is a bit of common sense and a basic idea of how much time has passed.

The other option, of course, is to do what my mother does and just get a joint of beef, brown it gently in a Le Creuset-style pot with olive oil and herbs, pour in some wine, a stock pot and then just stick it in the oven at a low heat for some number of hours.

The Deli: A Discourse

Soon after I came away to university, I (like many of my peers) quickly realised something I hadn't quite processed in the eighteen years I'd had in my parents' house: food is expensive. It's not something you really think about when you're living at home - food just appears in the cupboards and the fridge, as if by magic. You never really sit down and wonder "how much is a loaf of bread?" until your mum asks you to nip down the shops and get some, at which point you become pretty determined to get your £1.39 back. As a child, the game in the supermarket is always to try and sneak food into your trolley and see if your mum notices; as a student, it's debating whether you're really prepared to risk it on the basics chicken fillets to give you more money to spend on vodka.

When I did my first supermarket shop on my own at uni, I very quickly became that mental woman that everyone tries to ignore in Tesco, shouting at the cabbages. "ONE POUND THIRTY-NINE FOR A LOAF OF BREAD?" I exclaimed, startling an old dear buying crumpets. "I'm going to Asda - they're on two for £2.50 and I can just throw one loaf in the freezer," I informed nobody in particular, as a group of schoolchildren backed away from me clutching their sweets and looking terrified.

Meanwhile, while I'm barging through shoppers to get yellow-stickered, discounted food and having a heart attack at the price of bread, my parents are stocking their cupboards with all manner of Nice Things - olives, fancy crackers to go with posh cheeses, locally-produced rapeseed oil, Fortnum & Mason biscuits - okay, okay, those were a Christmas present. And it's all (apart from the biscuits) the fault of "Lots of Lemons" in the village.

Timed beautifully to coincide with my second year of university starting, a lovely couple in my village opened a deli. It boasts an impressive array of food, most of which is locally-sourced. Bread from Hobbs House Bakery in Nailsworth (as featured in the Channel 4 show "The Fabulous Baker Brothers"); rapeseed oil from just down the road in the Cotswolds; local cheeses - not to mention Sarah's incredible home-made quiches and pork pies. My parents make a point of going in there pretty much every weekend. They say they're being selfless and are helping to keep local businesses afloat. I say they're just greedy and like having nice food in the house.

I went in with them on Saturday and got chatting to Sarah, telling her a little bit about my corner on the web (that's this blog) and what my motivation for writing it was.

"There's this assumption that students only eat Pot Noodles and takeaways - and that's just not me," I explained. "I like cooking, I like knowing what's gone into my food - but I can't necessarily afford to buy really expensive ingredients." Like the Hobbs House bread, I thought sadly, because it isn't cheap but it blows Warburtons out of the water and into space. "I like making food that's good for you and tastes luxurious, but doesn't cost an absolute bomb. But I'm always caught between spending a little bit more on something that's higher quality; and getting food that's cheaper, but is lower quality or less ethical."

"Take these stuffed peppers," Sarah said (which I was disappointed to discover wasn't an invitation to just take the entire bowlful). "You can get these in a supermarket for maybe 20p cheaper, but they're nowhere near as good." She paused. "The issue is whether you care more about quality or price."

Well, maybe I'm just broken as a student, but my instinct is always to go for quality. If you go to a deli like this one or a specialty cheese shop and get a really decent cheddar - okay, it will cost more than what you could buy in the supermarket, but you need a lot less to get the same amount of flavour. The products stocked in Lots of Lemons are always going to be more expensive than what you can buy in supermarkets - but you pay for what you get, and what you get hasn't been shipped halfway round the world, and is likely to come from a place where the production methods are more environmentally-conscious and use techniques that have worked with nature, not against it, for hundreds of years.


In an age where chains are absolutely starting to dominate the high street, it's still somewhat novel for me to have a place I can go to where that is its only location. There isn't one up in York or down in Exeter; I can't nip into a Lots of Lemons Express to grab a sandwich on my lunch break or order my shopping from Lots of Lemons online - and thank goodness.


A trip to the deli is a treat, not a chore. When you walk in, there is always something different to try - a new bread, or a posh new dipping sauce (I can highly recommend the Cotstwold Gold Raspberry Drizzle, in case anyone's interested). Sarah and her husband Brian are always happy to help you pick out a cheese, or just have a bit of a natter about how your week's been. They are people who know what they're selling and as such are really engaged with the food they stock - you'll get no shrugs and "dunno"s from them if you ask what would really go with this interesting jelly or whether that cheese is particularly strong. And for me, this is really the heart of why you should occasionally allow yourself a little induldgence food-wise. 

Local, small business owners like Sarah and Brian need people who love food and are passionate about local, sustainable produce to come in and be prepared to part with a couple of pounds extra for their bread or their meat or their vegetables rather than automatically going to the supermarket. They need people to become interested in the origins of their food and for them to be a little more picky about what they buy.

One thing I noticed from my time in France was that meat - especially chicken - was much more expensive than at home. But you hardly ever saw massive trays of chicken at crazily reduced prices, and all of the chicken was certified by some board for poultry. The French eat less chicken but when they do have it, they'll spend more money and get higher quality food in return.

I think we should take their example and agree to spend a little bit more on bread, every so often, and get a really fantastic loaf that you actually enjoy, rather than just seeing as an edible plate for your sandwich filling. We should eat less meat but when we do, go to a butcher and spend a little bit more for a massive difference in taste - and knowledge. Nature doesn't want us to have strawberries in January, so just wait six months and then you can go to the greengrocers and have the ones that are grown in the country rather than halfway around the world, picked before they're ripe and forced to ripen in crates. We should go to delis like Lots of Lemons because the food is better, local businesses need support - and Sarah and Brian are just lovely people who care about their stock and are doing what they can to support local producers.

And isn't treating yourself to something really nice that you take delight in eating just one of the best indulgences ever?