Talking turkey

By: Mrs Robot

We had turkey for Christmas dinner this year.

"Yeah, yeah," you say, "everyone has turkey at Christmas." But we usually have goose, so this was a bit of a departure for us.

We also often have visitors on either Christmas Day or Boxing Day, but this time it was just the two of us (plus two greedy cats). It made the whole thing much more relaxed than usual. Mr Robot took over cooking duties. We started with prawn cocktail. That can sometimes be a bit of a sad dish, with teeny little prawns and some sweetener-laden glop out of a bottle, but in this case the sauce was made from scratch, covering the big, beautiful prawns we had in the freezer, and it all felt really luxurious. The prawns were so large the six we had each felt almost too much. And the hint of smoked paprika in the sauce really benefitted the whole dish. I could eat a lot of that!

After that we moved on to the classic turkey dinner.

Beautifully roasted turkey, pigs in blankets (for any Americans reading this, over here that's sausage wrapped in bacon, not sausage wrapped in pastry), roast parsnips,  roast carrots, sprouts sauteed with bacon, red cabbage cooked with apple, and a magnificent stuffing cake: breadcrumbs, cranberries, sage, onion and sausage meat wrapped in - you guessed it, MOAR BACON - and baked. To be honest, I could have said 'We had bacon for Christmas dinner this year' and probably not told a lie. All of it was covered in delicious gravy. Mr Robot puts a lot of effort into his gravies, taking great pride in their richness and depth of flavour.

The cats had a little dish of plain turkey each; they'd only wander round scrounging if we didn't give them anything at all.

The thing with such a big dinner is there are lots of leftovers. We don't usually get many leftovers with goose, so it's actually a bit of a treat. How can people get fed up of leftovers? It's like the best-ever kitchen challenge: one meat, redo it in as many different ways as possible. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! The stuffing cake is fantastic sliced and put in bread rolls for sandwiches, I've already turned some of the turkey into a turkey and ham pie, and tonight we'll be having a turkey curry. We've stocked the carcass so we can have a lovely turkey soup at some point. I also considered making a Vietnamese-inspired turkey salad, though I don't know if the turkey will stretch that far.

Though we'd cooked a pudding, the turkey dinner was so substantial and filling we couldn't face it, so picked at the cheese board and chatted instead. Here's Pippin on Mr Robot's chair, eyeing up an impressively reeky Petit Gagny.

Merry Christmas!