Getting Christmas lunch cooked and to the table hot can be really stressful and difficult. For many people this will be the biggest meal they cook each year and quite possibly the most people they ever cook a hot meal for at once.
I’ve noticed that modern ovens and cookers often only come with one or two shelves these days when they could take potentially 3 or 4. I got caught out by this a few years back after having a new cooker. Two shelves is fine most of the year but then came Christmas Day and I had trays of roast potatoes, roast parsnip, sausages and stuffing for about 10 people to cook and not enough shelves to take all the baking sheets. So todays tip is go and see how many shelves you have in your oven and see if you need one or two more.
Spare or extra oven shelves are available from Amazon from about £5 upwards.
My other tip along similar lines is about getting food to the table hot. There’s nothing worse than spoiling a meal by finding it’s gone cold by the time you get it to the table. Warming your plates is essential in my view. However at Christmas or anytime you are cooking for a lot of people you may find that you don’t have the oven space to warm them in the oven. Several years ago now I invested in a plate warmer.
I leave this on the counter in our utility room and use it most weekends to warm the plate for big family meals.
My final tip is to think about boiling water! When cooking a big meal you often seem to need a lot of boiling water about the same time and standing around waiting for a kettle to boil can really slow you down. I now keep a spare kettle in the utility room and bring the kitchen kettle and the spare kettle to the boil when I start cooking a big meal so I always have boiling water ready to go.
If you have any tips on taking the stress out of cooking for Christmas Day please leave a comment below, I’d love to hear from you.
I’ve been following your blog for a couple of years now and thought I’d comment on your last post. My wife and I were lucky enough to receive an electric plate warmer as a wedding present. I must agree with you, they really do make a great difference to the stress levels and help us get food to the table nice and hot when we have dinner parties.
This is an excellent tip – every Christmas I wish my cooker has more shelves. I didnt even know you could by extra shelves but have just gone to Amazon and ordered one. This is going to make it so much easier this year. Many thanks for your excellent blog.