Christmas Dinner

So my wife works from home minding our children and a one year old baby. I also work from home, but the nature of my work means that I'm in my home office for hours on end and sometimes I have to go to the office in Galway, Limerick or Dublin. This means on Monday to Friday my wife makes the dinners. I do do the cleanup and cook at the weekends, but all things being equal, my wife does more cooking. That's why I always cook Christmas dinner, well 90% of the time anyway.

So I thought I'd share some of my dinner prep with my Foodie friends.

Well that's what I thought I'd do around a week ago, and then just after I hit post, I went back in to edit the main photo and sure enough I managed to delete the post by accident. Full disclosure, I had had few drinks, but the pot had been written earlier that day before said drinks! Thanks a million to @hannes-stoffel who showed me how to get the deleted post back!

Starters

When it comes to a starter for Christmas, we almost always go for prawn cocktail. It's tasty. It's easy to prepare and it's quick.

All you need is lettuce, ketchup, mayonnaise and prawns.

I like to use cocktail glasses, but a bowl will do it you've none.

Grab your ingredients.

First mix some ketchup and mayonnaise together to make the sauce.

Then chop up your lettuce into small pieces. I like to put a dollop of sauce in the bottom, then prawns, then lettuce and keep repeating the sequence until your glasses are full like below.

The Main Course

Once the kids had opened up all their Santa presents, it was time for a Christmas movie and Elf was the choice. Excellent... One of my favourites. You can't beat a bit of Will Ferrell. That lad is one funny Bastard! Not five minutes in, I'd to get up and start getting things prepped. A turkey does not cook itself afterall!

Turkey check.

Stuffing. Check.

Spuds. Check.

Veggies. Check.

As the Turkey sat and got to room temperature, I got busy peeling spuds. I like roasties, so I par boil the spuds. Drain them. Batter them around in collinder a little bit.

Then they get this flaky stuff coating them which is lovely when roasted in the oven.

I then drizzle them with olive oil and add salt, pepper and some other spices.

These then go in the oven, but not until the turkey is around 45 minutes away from done. They end up looking like this.

For vegetables this year, I kept it pretty simple and did not do the usual Brussel Sprouts. Instead, I went for Carrots and Broccoli, as well as roasted parsnips, which I baked with the roastie spuds.

The Turkey took around 30 minutes per kilo and we had a 6 kilo bird, so 3 hours was how long it took. This year I cooked it with the giblets and some seasonal vegetables.

This is how things looked after the turkey was cooked, and I used this leftover to make a gravy. I divided away 2/3 of the stock.

Then I added 2 table spoons of flour and with a wooden spoon worked everything back into the mix.

I then added 1 litre of hot water and put the tray on a simmer for 30 minutes.

Best Gravy EVER!!!!

The Turkey itself looked pretty sweet too!

There are only five in my family, so needless to say there were Turkey sandwiches galore for the days that followed and plenty of Turkey, stuffing and spuds for dinner on St. Stephen's day and a few days afterwards. I must say, I really really like Turkey.

So that's it folks, again a big thanks to @hannes-stoffel @riverflows @darth-azrael and @cmplxty for helping me to find my deleted post. There was a little bit of formatting to do to get it back to life, but it sure beats having to start again from scratch!

Thanks as always for stopping by everyone

Peace Out