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I don't often post to LJ these days. To be honest, I usually have more interesting things to do. This morning however, the morning of my christmas party I find myself sitting in the eye of the storm with nothing much to do. So I thought I'd give you a little snap-shot of the finely honed dance that is our Christmas dinner.
This is our twelfth party I think, and a lot of things are still pretty familiar. We still do turkey with all the trimmings plus a whole random collection of other stuff. The pigs in blankets are still popular and at the darkest moments I always wonder if we could just serve those and booze and everyone would be happy. We're slimmer in numbers now (I think we had over 30 one year) thanks to friends departing London or losing touch, but there'll still be a good number of people who were there for (or helped host) the first one. With grown-up-ness comes the benefit of a car to do the shopping, but the irritation of having to work during the week, so we moved the party to Sunday to give us Saturday to prepare.
Bits and pieces were started during the week including testing new recipes and the main supermarket shop but the real prep starts on Saturday. I was up bright and early to start with the baking. As it turned out, I was actually up bright and early to clean the floor following a slightly enthusiastic and poorly contained turkey defrost. That dealt with, I breakfasted on "for the love of god eat it and get it out of the fridge" cheesecake and stared at the snow coming down. Back to baking. For some reason which I cannot explain, against considerable advice, I had decided to make a chocolate yule log. Never have I attempted a recipe with so many components or so many bowls. Spread out over several hours were mutterings of "well that doesn't look like it does in the book" and "this isn't going to spread" and outright hysteria when it came to the actual rolling process (there was much oozing). But now it's done it actually looks like a chocolate log (god knows what it tastes like or if it's even possible to slice it) and I don't have to go with emergency backup plan of mixing it all in a bowl and re-labling it a christmas eton mess.
Saturday lunchtime saw we three housemates bearing rucksacks, travelling afar (well to Ealing) when it became clear driving to Sainsburys to get the vegetables wasn't really an option. The snow really was very pretty and lovely to crunch through on the way there, although less lovely trudging back with laden bags and snow down your back from an obnoxious housemate (no bonus points for guessing which one). There was a minor red cabbage and mincemeat crisis, but the overpriced organic shop eventually came to the rescue.
The afternoon was when things really kicked off. In no particular order we peeled, parboiled, baked, whatever-one-does-to-a-tiramisu-ed, fried, food processed and wrapped our way through everything and anything we could possibly do in advance. Our new kitchen is getting a thorough work out, I continue to battle with the hob that hates me and lost an argument with the tap that generates boiling water (it's called a quooker, but that's a silly name so we call it the dragling) which added two scorched fingers to the one I burnt the previous day on a very dangerous microwaved curry. The biggest joy of the new kitchen was revealed when we found we could program the oven to come on all by itself, meaning no one had to get up at 5 to put Bert the turkey on! Next step is the robot that we can train to take one turkey out and put the other one in.
But we don't have that robot, so up I get at 8am and start a second day with turkey wrestling: Bert out, Ernie in. Breakfast was once again "seriously, there's no space for it in the fridge" cheesecake and more staring at the snow worried that we'd have to eat all this food by ourselves. I'm also realising I've made a rookie error - while I can make the mince pies and there's space for them in the oven... sharing the space with the turkey is likely to result in odd tasting pastry. I'm going to have to re-evaluate the post-it note plan and re-arrange some stuff (no gantt chart this year, I've moved on to coloured postits stuck to the front of a cupboard, much to the mocking of my housemates).
So, with my tea drunk, it's back into the fray.
( The menu for today: )
This is our twelfth party I think, and a lot of things are still pretty familiar. We still do turkey with all the trimmings plus a whole random collection of other stuff. The pigs in blankets are still popular and at the darkest moments I always wonder if we could just serve those and booze and everyone would be happy. We're slimmer in numbers now (I think we had over 30 one year) thanks to friends departing London or losing touch, but there'll still be a good number of people who were there for (or helped host) the first one. With grown-up-ness comes the benefit of a car to do the shopping, but the irritation of having to work during the week, so we moved the party to Sunday to give us Saturday to prepare.
Bits and pieces were started during the week including testing new recipes and the main supermarket shop but the real prep starts on Saturday. I was up bright and early to start with the baking. As it turned out, I was actually up bright and early to clean the floor following a slightly enthusiastic and poorly contained turkey defrost. That dealt with, I breakfasted on "for the love of god eat it and get it out of the fridge" cheesecake and stared at the snow coming down. Back to baking. For some reason which I cannot explain, against considerable advice, I had decided to make a chocolate yule log. Never have I attempted a recipe with so many components or so many bowls. Spread out over several hours were mutterings of "well that doesn't look like it does in the book" and "this isn't going to spread" and outright hysteria when it came to the actual rolling process (there was much oozing). But now it's done it actually looks like a chocolate log (god knows what it tastes like or if it's even possible to slice it) and I don't have to go with emergency backup plan of mixing it all in a bowl and re-labling it a christmas eton mess.
Saturday lunchtime saw we three housemates bearing rucksacks, travelling afar (well to Ealing) when it became clear driving to Sainsburys to get the vegetables wasn't really an option. The snow really was very pretty and lovely to crunch through on the way there, although less lovely trudging back with laden bags and snow down your back from an obnoxious housemate (no bonus points for guessing which one). There was a minor red cabbage and mincemeat crisis, but the overpriced organic shop eventually came to the rescue.
The afternoon was when things really kicked off. In no particular order we peeled, parboiled, baked, whatever-one-does-to-a-tiramisu-ed, fried, food processed and wrapped our way through everything and anything we could possibly do in advance. Our new kitchen is getting a thorough work out, I continue to battle with the hob that hates me and lost an argument with the tap that generates boiling water (it's called a quooker, but that's a silly name so we call it the dragling) which added two scorched fingers to the one I burnt the previous day on a very dangerous microwaved curry. The biggest joy of the new kitchen was revealed when we found we could program the oven to come on all by itself, meaning no one had to get up at 5 to put Bert the turkey on! Next step is the robot that we can train to take one turkey out and put the other one in.
But we don't have that robot, so up I get at 8am and start a second day with turkey wrestling: Bert out, Ernie in. Breakfast was once again "seriously, there's no space for it in the fridge" cheesecake and more staring at the snow worried that we'd have to eat all this food by ourselves. I'm also realising I've made a rookie error - while I can make the mince pies and there's space for them in the oven... sharing the space with the turkey is likely to result in odd tasting pastry. I'm going to have to re-evaluate the post-it note plan and re-arrange some stuff (no gantt chart this year, I've moved on to coloured postits stuck to the front of a cupboard, much to the mocking of my housemates).
So, with my tea drunk, it's back into the fray.
( The menu for today: )
