Christmas Dinner!

For Christmas dinner, we had a family dinner with Kerri’s mum and her brother and his family, who kindly allowed us to take over their kitchen to cook it. We had turkey of course, as is obvious from the picture below. When we collected the turkey from the butcher (a free range bronze turkey from Appledore in Kent), it was in a box which also contained several sprigs of rosemary. So having stuffed the neck end with the stuffing, we popped the rosemary into the cavity along with half an onion, half a lemon and a couple of garlic cloves. Always good to leave some space for air to circulate in the cavity to bring the cooking time down. After trying to de-feather the poor bird a bit more, we took it over to Kerri’s brother’s house on Christmas Eve so that they could put it into the oven on Christmas morning.

So when we arrived on Christmas morning, the turkey was already in the oven and turning a delicious golden colour. We had stuffed it the night before with some delicious and very sagey sausagemeat stuffing that Kerri’s mum had prepared. We stuffed the neck end only, as we didn’t want to add too much to the cooking time of the bird and dry it out. That was only half the stuffing though, so we cooked the rest of it separately.

With a glass of bubbly in hand, we set about preparing the rest of it: roast potatoes in goose fat (left over from our pre-Christmas dinner of roast goose), roast parsnips, brussels sprouts with pancetta, steamed carrots and peas.

Sliced stuffing:

Afterwards, we somehow miraculously still had some space for Christmas pudding, which we served with either brandy cream or brandy sauce, depending on peoples’ preferences. We didn’t cater for people whose preferences didn’t include brandy though, as there was loads of it in the pudding too.

And on boxing day we had baked ham with marmalade glaze and of course turkey sandwiches. Even with a smaller turkey than usual, we of course still had loads of leftovers.

And given that we hadn’t brought a mince pie tray along with us, we made one large mince pie lattice instead:

We do have loads of mincemeat left that didn’t get turned into pies and I am trying to think of ways to use it up. There’s no reason that it necessarily needs to only be eaten at Christmas, given that it’s so tasty.