Joanne Roach (00:14)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies. It's the middle of November already and we've done Bonfire Night and Halloween so inevitably the shops and the adverts are already full of Christmas.
Maybe you're someone who wishes everyone would just wait until December 1st to mention the holidays, that's me. Or maybe you're someone who loves everything about it and has your lights up in October.
But however you celebrate over this holiday period, one thing is certain. There will be lots of food and that food will need preparing and depending on whether you host or are hosted as a guest some of that might be stressful.
So this episode is all about how to use the slightly grey and flat couple of weeks at the end of November to think about making your holiday season a bit easier food wise. I have some ideas about preparing your kitchen, some ideas about preparing some food and a short interview with Kate Hall from The Full Freezer about how to use your freezer. So let's get into it!
Joanne Roach (01:17)
The first thing that you can do during this time which takes pressure off the kitchen in December is to spend a little bit of time having a bit of a think about how you use your kitchen over the holidays and when you have guests and whether there are any things that always come up that irritate you. Do you always get your big Christmas shop in and then realise you haven't got space to put things away and you end up with stuff all over the counters giving you nowhere to prep anything.
Do you always run out of fridge space and end up chucking some things like chutneys and pickles out because you need the space and then feeling bad about wasting food?
Do you always realise too late every year that you haven't got enough freezer space for that giant gateau or all that ice cream that those little cousins eat when they come over for the big family dinner?
Or every year you think you wish you could use some of those easy oven canapes from the shops for New Year but your freezer's always too full and there's nowhere to put them beforehand?
And do you end up with so many duplicates and the same leftovers piling up every year that you always find food in January irritating and a bit depressing because of all of the using up stuff that has no more celebration left in it? If any of these things are true, let's see now what we can do in November that might reduce those things this year.
First of all, can you get your kitchen more ready to perform well? This might mean cleaning the oven this weekend, or giving the fridge a good wipe through and checking the defrost drain is all clear and it's not going to bung up at the wrong moment.
This might mean something as simple as just going through your pans and remembering if any of them are always rubbish or whether you've meant to get a new roasting tin for four years now and you always forget until the night before Christmas. It might mean going into that drawer of doom where all the utensils are that you only use a couple of times a year and if you don't feel like tidying it, which I totally understand, you can at least fish them out so that they're easily to hand when you're already in a rush like that melon baller that you only use for that one dessert that grandma likes. Or the nutcrackers for the one time of year that you buy nuts in their shells because it's cosy. Pull those things out and get them ready now. Do you have enough of things like foil, parchment paper, Tupperwares and freezer bags to deal with all the leftovers.
All of these small things really aren't important individually, but they can all add up to make you feel harassed and flustered when there are people over and hungry tired kids around and presents still to wrap up. So a little organisation now will go a long way to making your future self a bit calmer and more prepared in December.
So next, let's tackle your store cupboards. This can work both ways. It might be that you're low on a bunch of things that might be needed for the holiday period. I'm thinking of things like table sauces, gravy granules, icing sugar, cooking oil, salt, herbs, and even things like sherry. It's always helpful for your budget if you can get some of those things that are kind of food accessories in November to spread the financial load a bit. Have a check through some of the cupboards and the fridge and see what's running low and get some of those things in now. Also if you know you're going to be on a tight budget, there are quite a few things for the celebration meals that you can buy or prepare ahead now to spread the load and I will come to those in a minute. But in the meantime, definitely check your staples and see what you can get ahead on.
On the other hand, you might be one of those people who answered yes at the start when I asked if you bring your big shop home and have nowhere to put it, in which case you have about four weeks left to try to use up some of the things which are taking up space. Pull things out of your cupboards that you've not got round to using or that you've accidentally bought duplicates of. Check through your freezer and make a list of what's in there and which items are either the oldest or are taking up the most space then sit down and work out how to use up some of those ingredients in the next four weeks. A couple of meals a week can be dedicated to using up these items. They will save some money anyway because it's food you already have and they'll clear some space. The way I do this is to go to an online service like eatyourbooks.com where you can put in two or three ingredients, choose what type of meal you're looking for and any dietary requirements and then click the tab for online recipes and it will search the web for recipes which use as many of the items you entered as possible. There are also a bunch of apps that do this like Magic Fridge, Big Oven and Supercook so they can save you some time coming up with ideas. Plan a couple of recipes a week for the next month to use stuff up and you will have cleared some space already and saved a bit of money.
While you're doing this process, make a quick note of the things that you already have in that should end up on your holiday shopping list if you didn't notice you had it in. So for example, do you still have half a jar of cranberry sauce in the fridge and you only ever eat a few spoonfuls so the half jar will be enough?
Going back to things like sherry for trifle, if you checked the recipe does it turn out you actually already have enough sherry for that? If you actually have time now to start making a list of what you need for the holidays, then that definitely will take the stress off December. But if you don't have time to start thinking about it now, then at least note down the items that you find that you already have, so that as soon as you start making your big list, you can immediately cross them off.
Okay so you've made a start on getting your kitchen ready to do your holiday celebrations and you've started to make some room for the additional things that you only eat at these big feast times. But is there stuff you can be doing to actually start prepping things now before we get into the chaos of school Christmas fairs and assemblies and visiting relatives and gift shopping?
What can we tick off now? Well, quite a lot.
Joanne Roach (06:44)
I'm going to cover some Christmas specific foods to prep ahead as well as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and obviously a lot of the side dishes, starters and party foods are good for anyone who's getting together to share time with family during the UK Bank holidays.
Joanne Roach (07:02)
Okay so starting with Christmas food you can prep, cook or par cook quite a lot of foods ahead of Christmas Day and put them in the freezer and let's start that off by cutting to a short interview with Kate Hall from the full freezer about that because she has a free download that goes through it in more details and she also has some suggestions about leftovers which reminds us of another good reason to free up some space in the freezer during November. So let's hear from her.
Joanne (07:31)
So Kate, I think people would be really happy to have some tips about how to make Christmas and any other holiday that they're celebrating with their family a little bit easier by using their freezer.
Kate (07:42)
So this is one of my absolute favourite things. if you are preparing a traditional Christmas dinner, you will hopefully be pleased to know that you can prep pretty much everything in advance and have it there ready in your freezer to cook from frozen. So things like roast potatoes, carrots if you're roasting those parsnips, Brussels sprouts, all sorts of vegetables. And if you're celebrating a different, family gathering or another religious event, then vegetables obviously are going to be used in different dishes. So again, you can prep and freeze however you're going to want to use them And then you can use them in your cooking from frozen.
So when it comes to the Christmas dinner side of things, I have actually got a download which is totally free. It's called the Stress Free Christmas Dinner. And I run through what things you might want to cook in some way in advance and which things you're literally just preparing and freezing. And I also cover a little bit around the leftovers and the fact that, if you've, cooked this beautiful it is really important that, you know, we don't let that food go to waste. So I share a lot around food safety, making sure you cool your foods down, they can be out for a couple of hours and just remembering to get things into the fridge.
And the fact that you can have a couple of days to decide if you want to freeze things. So you don't have to freeze it immediately. But you can have the option there to freeze things like cooked turkey. You could freeze cooked pigs in blankets. If anybody ever has any of those left, I personally never did. But you know, you can. And then there's options there as well when it comes to things like roasted vegetables. If you've already cooked your veg, generally it won't freeze well and reheat well as cooked veg. I wouldn't recommend roasting a potato, freezing it, and then re-roasting it. ⁓ You can do it, but the quality will degrade. ⁓ But what you can do is things like make soups out of those cooked vegetables. So if you don't want to make up a kind of Christmas dinner soup immediately, you could open freeze all of your leftover veg, ⁓ as long as you know it's not been on people's plates and as long as it's not been sat out all day long, you could freeze those individual pieces and then when you want to use it, you can just grab a couple of handfuls, just whiz that up into a soup from frozen, you don't have to defrost things, you can just cook them back through. it's little things like that that I find it's really helpful for things like lunches if you've got family visiting or something and you want to whiz up something that's relatively quick, so you're not having to get a chopping board out or anything.
The only thing that I find a bit tricky with it is that if you are using leftovers, so if you're using veg or meat or anything from the freezer that's already been cooked, it should only be reheated once. So you have to get your portions right. If you're going to make a soup using leftover cooked frozen food, you then need to eat it in that one sitting. The more that our food sits at room temperature in our homes, the more opportunity it has for that bad bacteria to grow. So if we are reheating and cooling and reheating and cooling and reheating and cooling, we're giving it more and more opportunities. And unfortunately, cooking kills bacteria, but it doesn't kill toxins or poisons that come from spores within the bacteria. So it's, it's really important. And particularly, you know, if you're feeding small children or elderly relatives or pregnant women, it's, it's something to always, always keep in mind.
Joanne (11:27)
Nobody needs food poisoning over the Christmas period, do they?
Kate (11:31)
Exactly, absolutely.
Joanne (11:33)
So that's a lot of great advice about how to use up the leftovers, but the preparing for Christmas you have a handout that you mentioned for that.
Kate (11:42)
Yeah, absolutely. So there's the Stress-Free Christmas Dinner handout. And also if anyone wants to hop into my Can I Freeze It? account, I have "Can I Freeze It?"s showing you individually how to freeze
your parsnips, how to freeze your carrots in batons, how to freeze your broccoli, whatever it is you're using. So there's a variety and there are a few little twists in there as well. if you happen to have any leftover wine for example, like that's another one that you can freeze and then you've got handy cubes of wine for cooking as well. So
Joanne Roach (12:18)
So as Kate said, most of the vegetable side dishes can be par cooked or totally cooked and frozen, ready to finish off on the day.
If you make your own pigs in blankets, those can be put together now and frozen ready to roast and price of the two components will probably cost less now in November too.
You can make most stuffings ahead of time and if you're in a family where no one considers it to be a proper roast without a Yorkshire pud, those can be done ahead too. If you have vegetarians in the family, then nut roasts can be cooked and sliced in advance and Wellingtons can be made up ready to cook at the last minute to puff up the pastry. You can even make gravies and sauces for the freezer too.
Quite a lot of pudding options can be made and frozen too. We have always made an ice cream bomb because no one here likes Christmas pudding or Christmas cake, So we make the cake and the ice cream well in advance and then just take it out of the freezer sometime Christmas morning and pour over the chocolate and then pop it back in to set up. So that's just one example but quite a lot of family favourite desserts freeze pretty well if they don't have ingredients that split. I will link in the show notes to lots of Kate's Can I Freeze It reels that go through loads of those common freezer foods as well as linking to her current post where you can get that download she mentioned for free.
If you're celebrating Hanukkah, latkes freeze beautifully. After cooking them, space them out on a tray to keep them separate until they're frozen and then you can lob them into a bag. You can even cook them straight from frozen until they're hot through and crispy. Cooked beef brisket can be stored in the freezer without sauce for a couple of months and in gravy even longer. And if you make your own challah the best time to freeze it is after the first rise and allow the second rise as it defrosts, but you can also freeze baked challah and just reheat it. I will link instructions to both.
And if you're a family who celebrates Kwanzaa, then you can cook ahead and freeze callaloo, collards or any other greens, and as a bonus they take up less space cooked and then frozen than they do fresh in your fridge. It's best to add things like coconut milk that might split or things that might go chewy like ham when you reheat them after defrosting though. Buttermilk scones or biscuits can be frozen either before baking or after and both work really well. Gumbo sauce without rice can be cooked and frozen if you don't put in the seafood because that can go rubbery when it defrosts. But other meats are fine in the sauce, just defrost it slowly and then add your seafood elements on reheating. Beany recipes like red beans and Hopping John can definitely be made ahead without the rice and often the spices develop more in the freezer. Cornbread also freezes well before or after cooking but most people prefer not to freeze mac and cheese as the pasta texture can change in the freezer. But we often freeze cheese sauce here to shorten the job on the day and then you can just add in extra grated cheese when assembling.
For party food for everybody, pastry products like sausage rolls, mini pasties etc can be made ahead and frozen before cooking so that you've done all the fiddly work and you can just cook them through and puff the pastry up. Blinis can be frozen after cooking for several months. Prepared but not cooked cheese straws can be cooked straight from the Mackerel pate also freezes brilliantly and just needs a good stir on defrosting, as well as everybody's fall back dip of hummus.
Of course you don't have to make anything in advance if you don't want to, but if you do think it will make your life easier, then why not do one or two of those jobs now before the relentless but fun Christmas events from school, nursery, scouts, the football team and everyone else starts up, never mind any adult work events or rushing to visit relatives. Even one or two small jobs might make a difference to this year.
A bonus of starting some things early is that it's easier to let children help with small jobs when there's no time pressure and no visitors around. Maybe your children can peel or stir or measure some of your foods now, whereas you might find it too stressful on the day. But you can still remind them which dishes they helped to prepare when the big day rolls around so they can proudly tell people how they helped. And if you have got lots of prep done and so you're less stressed at the time, it does give you a to let them come into the kitchen and be bit more involved with making celebration foods. Instead of getting that feeling that big dinners are only a source of stress, they can make some fun memories of how they joined in with the holiday cooking.
So that's my run through of some practical ways to use the very dull November days to look forward and prep for your festive food. do check out all the helpful links in the show notes for how to do some of these things in advance. I'll be back in a few days with another episode. I hope to see you then and in the meantime, happy eating!
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