The Best Christmas Food Ever
Top chef Paul Ainsworth on how making tasty festive food can be easy…
Mon-fri / BBC1
I find the mere thought of cooking a festive feast overwhelming, so I’ll be tuning in as chefs Catherine Fulvio and Paul Ainsworth share simple seasonal recipes in this series. Paul tells us his top tips…
The Best Christmas Food Ever Monday-friday / BBC1 / 3.45pm
The countdown to Christmas has well and truly begun, and if, like us, you’re already panicking over what festive fare to serve your nearest and dearest throughout the season, fear not!
Over the next two weeks, multi-award winning chef Paul Ainsworth and Irish culinary queen Catherine Fulvio (together, right) will be showing us how to make mouth-watering dishes and sweet treats in their new daytime series The Best Christmas Food Ever.
Here, in an exclusive interview with TV Times, Paul, 39, reveals what’s on the menu…
How would you sum up the series? Catherine and I wanted to show viewers how Christmas cooking needn’t be scary – it shouldn’t make you feel anxious; it should be fun! We’ve created 48 recipes that use all those things that conjure up Christmas, like cranberries, oranges and cloves. I want people to watch and go, ‘Right, I’m off to the shops to get my ingredients!’
In each episode, you and Catherine are joined by a celebrity guest. Tell us more…
It was so much fun and there was something magical about creating all this special food to share with them and hearing their Christmas memories. Christopher Biggins was hilarious. He told me he wasn’t a fan of cabbage or chestnuts, which was unfortunate because one of the recipes I did with him was pot roast cabbage with bacon and chestnut dressing! I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be good, then!’ But he ended up really liking it. Debbie Mcgee and Martine Mccutcheon also appear.
How did you inspire them? Martine loves Yorkshire puddings but has never made her own. So I made the ultimate Yorkshire pudding with creamed mushrooms on top, which I prepared with thyme, shallots and tarragon. She was blown away. And Debbie had never made her own stuffing before, so I showed her how to make one from
scratch. What’s your top advice for using up Christmas Day leftovers? Everyone loves a Scotch egg, and whatever roast you have on Christmas Day this works. You cut up all the leftover roast potatoes, carrots, sprouts and cabbage really small then heat them up to bring them back to life. Use good sausage meat to bind them all together, wrap it round the egg, dip in breadcrumbs before frying, and you’ve got the perfect
Scotch egg. What’s your favourite
Christmas Day food?
I’m really looking forward to cooking a turkey. I cook the legs separately to the breast. You can turn the turkey legs into proper old-fashioned turkey rolls by filling them with sausage meat, apricots, cranberries and pistachios, rolling them up in tinfoil and baking in an oven. Then you have the two breasts left on the crown, which can be cooked to perfection.
What are your earliest memories of Christmas food?
We never went to restaurants when I was young so I didn’t really know what a starter was, but on Christmas Day my mum would always make a smoked salmon starter. That was very special!
We never went to restaurants when I was young, so I didn’t know what a starter was