Simple festive treats from favourite chef
Channel 4, 8pm
IT’S supposed to be a time to bring the family together around the table, but Jamie Oliver knows that Christmas dinner can be stressful – and so did his nan.
In fact, one of chef’s most memorable meals involves her and a festive mishap.
The chef and TV presenter recalls: “My earliest memories of Christmas are when we served people in the pub until 2.30pm, then we’d close up, draw the curtains, gather around the fire and cook our Christmas dinner. I’ll never forget one time when we’d just started eating and suddenly my dad was beating my nan up.
“I knew as a seven-year-old that it wasn’t right, your dad to be bashing your nan around the head, but I quickly realised that he wasn’t abusing her, he was trying to put her out! She’d enthusiastically gone for the stuffing or the sprouts, leant over and her hair ablaze. It was a blue rinse, quite bouffant and required lots of hairspray to keep it structurally sound. She was highly flammable and she’d set herself on fire.”
You might think that might have taught him about the need to be careful, but Jamie admits he isn’t immune to making mistakes himself.
He says: “I used to make banoffee pie for dessert, which involved boiling tins of condensed milk for hours in a pan of water. I let it boil dry once and as I’m sure you know, if you heat a tin long enough, it’ll explode.
“Normally it might contain tomatoes or something quite innocent but when it’s boiling black caramel, it’s really dangerous. Luckily, no-one was in the kitchen at the time but I came back to find stalactites and stalagmites of caramel all over the room. It looked quite impressive, actually! Getting distracted is your enemy, for men in general and also at Christmas.”
Fortunately for those cooks with shorter attention spans, this year he’s bringing us the two-parter Jamie’s Easy Christmas, which features dishes that will see us through the festive season – from nibbles to the big dinner on the day itself – but won’t require hours of prepping and the associated stress.
In the first episode, he’s concentrating on party food, offering no-fuss takes on everything from crispy duck and noodles and short rib beef, to veggie filo pie and a decadent dessert.
If that last dish doesn’t sound in keeping with Jamie’s reputation for promoting healthy eating, it seems even he makes an exception for Christmas.
Speaking ahead of an earlier festive series, he said: “I think we give ourselves time off at Christmas and rightly so. The joy of food is indulgence and comfort. It’s buying, cooking and eating for deliciousness, not righteousness.
“Besides, healthy recipes aren’t really the issue at Christmas, the issue is eating too much. It’s not ingredients, it’s sheer volume! Most of us get that wrong at Christmas, including me, and then we all waddle into January the same way every year.”
Perhaps he needs to come back in the new year with some quick, easy, low-calorie options.