Getting ready for Christmas 2012

I hope your Christmas went to plan and you had a lovely time. I know it’s January but now is a really good time to reelect on what worked well this Christmas and what we could improve. It’s a useful exercise and if you are planning a big family event at Easter you might be able to put some of the lessons learnt into action then.

I’ve got two immediate improvements I plan to make. Some of our guests were delayed and we had to keep dinner warm a little longer than expected in the oven. The problem was we didn’t have enough space. Well actually we did have enough space, what we didn’t have was enough shelves. This is easily fixed at a low cost. If you do a search on Amazon you’ll find lots of suppliers selling spare oven shelves often for under £20. I’m going to get a couple more selves as its a really cheap way to upgrade your oven. The other thing I plan to do is buy some new cooking trays which better fit the width of my oven. I ended up with roast veg in two trays, each taking a shelf when they could have been all together in one big tray on the same shelf. This will help with better oven space usage and help produce a better result. Most domestic ovens vary greatly from shelf to shelf in terms of heat and cooking time. You’ve probably noticed that things will brown faster on some shelves in your oven. So I think it’s really worth trying to pick up some new trays in the January sales.