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.