24 Dec 2023
Elena Hogg, founder of local culinary company FOOD by Elena, is preparing for her festive feasts…
How are the stress levels? Any sleepless nights yet? Christmas anxiety is in full swing for many of us and every year seems to be the same. There’s something so sacrosanct about Christmas that, even in the face of abject panic and near-bankruptcy, we soldier on, determined to enjoy ourselves and live every exhausting minute in high spirits.
My mind conjures a face smiling broadly in that frozen, strained way while the eyes belie total horror. “Christmasmania”, I think I’ve seen it dubbed.
And mania is right, certainly food-wise. In almost every other culinary scenario, whether it be hosting a dinner party, Sunday lunch or a midweek meal, we have seen a rise in ways to cut corners and streamline the workload.
It’s become de rigueur, indeed, to boast about just how little time it took to throw together the very appetising one-pot wonder that’s being served up for supper with friends. A smug host is a happy host. But, when it comes to Christmas, we seem hell-bent on making it about as difficult on ourselves as possible, and Christmas Day passes in a whirl of peeling, basting and a fervid search for the gravy boat.
Please don’t imagine, though, that I’m anti-Christmas. Far from it. I hold dear the magic of this time of year and see it in my children’s eyes when the tree goes up (albeit usually with a bit of a lean and certainly a few precariously hung baubles that won’t make it to Boxing Day).
Still now, like I did as a child, I delight in seeing the Christmas lights go up around the neighbourhood, or in watching the pile of gifts under the tree grow, with so much promise among the ribbons and bows glinting in the tree lights.
The fact that nowadays I’m the one to put most of them there obviously dampens the fun a little…
This year, the anxiety levels are low for me, luckily. I am not hosting on Christmas Day. The only meal I’m responsible for is one my parents will join us for on Christmas Eve. And because my parents don’t care a jot for tradition, in
the words of the Village People, I can do whatever I feel. It’s intoxicating, the freedom of not having to meet anyone’s demands or pretend to be an utterly unflustered and unflappable host.
I’m thinking, quite seriously, of making egg and chips for Christmas Eve, because my dad has said nigh-on every single year that that’s what we should have for Christmas, usually after an in-depth discussion about the many complicated and cumbersome things we’ll feed everyone. Wouldn’t it be fun to finally make the ridiculous a reality? It seems so deliciously subversive, and who doesn’t love egg and chips at the end of the day?
The other contender for Christmas Eve dinner is macaroni au gratin – the least nutritious carb-fest there ever was.
My mum would make it when I was a child. She’d boil rigatoni or tortiglioni (and apparently my sense of tradition is alive and well because I really couldn’t have it with any other kind of pasta shape), drain and place in a single layer into a big, flat roasting tray. She’d then blanket the pasta in a truly suffocating layer of grated gruyère cheese. A ‘sprinkling’ will not cut it; be warned.
If you’d like a nod to nutrition or a pop of colour, dot with halved cherry tomatoes.
Pop under the grill until the cheese is melted and browning in places.
Hold your nerve; wait to see browning patches of cheese before you pull the tray out.
As well as adding a good grind of black pepper, my advice is to put your dinner plates in to warm under the grill rack because, no matter how fast you inhale the tubes of pasta all gluey with cheese, they lose heat quickly so a warmed plate helps.
The nearest thing to proper Christmas hosting I’ll do this year happened last weekend, in fact, when we had round friends we know through our eldest’s old
infant school. They are lovely people with no grand expectations of whoever’s hosting, which makes spending time with them relaxed and very enjoyable.
So I thought I’d offer something informal and slightly humorous to eat: a grazing platter in the shape of a Christmas tree, adorned with ‘baubles’ of olives,
sundried tomatoes, balsamic onions and other deli-veggies, as well as cheese and charcuterie ‘tinsel’ and a brie ‘star’ at the top.
I urge you to try your own this Christmas filled with whatever nibbles and bits you have to hand. Patés, smoked salmon, crisps, nuts and dried fruit, even fridge-lurkers that have seen better days can be rendered festive when shaped into a snowman, right?
I also made turkey and cranberry sausage rolls, because a party’s not a party without pastry. I mixed up my own turkey filling with Baharat seasoning, ground coriander and some garlic, which sounds like it’d give a middle-eastern flavour, but actually just provides a good savoury base for the cranberry sweetness to play off.
They can be frozen before and after baking, too, so a useful addition to the Christmas arsenal.
After some deliberation, for pudding I decided to make a trifle; probably because it’s one of the Christmas staples I never had often. Many of the traditional recipes I came across required strawberries and strawberry jelly, which I cannot bring myself to use in December, when they’re seasonal in June.
So I started to think about a more festive version and decided upon gingerbread, which I love and, to
make life easy on myself, I conveniently and cheaply bought at the supermarket. I added caramel sauce to cream then whipped it all up with ginger powder and the syrup from a jar of stem ginger I found.
I ended up layering the trifle with a sour cream mixture, to break through the sweetness and also to provide a snowy white topping to decorate with little
gingerbread people, chunks of the gingerbread and crumbled ginger biscuits (which I’d used in the layering too).
The result was a chewy, unctuous, indulgent pud, and I was extremely glad to have leftovers, because everyone knows the leftovers are the best bit of Christmas. Egg and chip sandwich, anyone?
