Christmas cooking fills my children with fear
THE experts make Christmas cooking look easy but the reality is that experience has taught your family to fear the feat, writes Susie O’Brien.
Susie O'Brien
Don't miss out on the headlines from Susie O'Brien. Followed categories will be added to My News.
THIS year, I am in deep, deep denial about having to cook Christmas dinner for three generations of my family.
Food fails? I’ve had a few.
There was the time I had a dinner party and hit the champers a little too hard and miscounted the diners. I was halfway through serving up main course and had to take the plates off the table in order to redistribute the food. Another time I was cooking with a friend and we put a lemon tart and a roast pork in the oven together. The roast pork had a lovely lemon flavour but the lemon tart with pork infusion wasn’t so nice.
CHRISTMAS 2017: WHAT GUESTS HAVE TO BRING
CHRISTMAS 2017: AUSSIES TO SPEND $50BN
I’ve had too many culinary horrors to recount. The overcooked gluggy risoni that looked like rice and set like cement. The Donna Hay honeycomb ice cream that looked like grey vomit with brown floatie bits. And my kids’ favourites — panacottas with raspberry puree — which have a habit of collapsing on the plate like they have given up and want to die.
Everyone is offering advice on how to get through the festive season unscathed. But stress-free Christmas tips just stress me out.
Draw up a food budget and stick to it. Yeah, right.
Keep it simple so you’ve got less cooking to do on the day. As if.
Keep on top of the washing. Ha!
Why don’t they offer practical tips like, “Don’t forget to remove the risqué reading matter from the back toilet before Grandma arrives”?
And “keep the eggnog away from Great-Uncle Graham”.
The magic of Christmas starts weeks before with planning the menu, making ingredient lists, doing the shopping, and starting the prep.
The day, itself, starts with a frantic search for the $59-a-kilo prawns in the fridge, only for you to discover they’ve been left in the back seat of the car. That would account for that really bad odour you thought was your teenage son’s foot fungus. Oh well, there goes entree.
Christmas Day passes in a blur of cooking, serving, clearing and washing up. It’s made much harder because you’re also trying to keep kids off their phones and tablets so the extended family is impressed by your outdoorsy non-tech parenting approach. (My trick is to bribe them with iTunes vouchers.)
Oh yes, and making sure Grandma doesn’t get drunk on one glass of champagne and start arguments about something that happened in her family in 1917.
Maybe the trick is to invite only people who love to eat but hate to cook. Sure, they might not be much help in the kitchen, but at least they will be wildly appreciative of your pathetic efforts.
Every year around this time, I start dreaming about how fabulous this year’s festive feast is going to be.
I fork out big bucks on the Christmas editions of all the cooking mags and pore over the beautifully styled spreads containing blonde-haired children in outfits colour-matched to the food.
I am seduced by dishes such as profiterole trifle, root vegetable tarte tartin and mushroom and kale croissant pudding, even though I am not even sure what they are.
Never has so little culinary success been preceded by so much optimism.
In Delicious, Matt Preston suggests Damascene raspberry and saffron pavlova which looks like an edible opera house. My house is more drama scene than Damascene — especially when the kids realise their much-loved pav has been given a trendy makeover with saffron.
Brodee Myers-Cooke, editor-in-chief of Taste magazine, has this to say: “Turning your piece de resistance into a spectacular celebration cake can be surprisingly easy when you give your imagination carte blanche.” Her imagination led her to create to a four-layer sponge with jam and cream, iced with choc glaze artfully melting down the side and topped with freeze-dried raspberries and macaroons.
The only thing I am capable of imagining right now is waking up on Boxing Day when it’s all over. I am pretty sure I won’t be making any desserts taller than they are wide. Or anything with more than one layer.
I am still having nightmares about a failed Christmas raspberry meringue from a few years ago that had three layers.
It was about 40C and the whole thing collapsed dramatically, making the entire table look like a crime scene in a snowfield.
(Should have followed Donna Hay’s tip and used fresh raspberries, not frozen).
It’s the same when it comes to Christmas crafts.
Pinterest wants me to turn my pool noodles into a giant wreath for the side of my house. It wants me to repurpose toilet rolls into Christmas tree decorations (use the toilet paper first, they usefully suggest). And it wants me to paint a Christmas tree using a fork.
No, no, no.
When it comes to Christmas catering, maybe the best thing to do would be to follow my kids’ advice.
“I love your cooking, mum, you’re the best,” my oldest son says.
“But maybe we should just get the whole thing catered this year?”
Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist
AFL locker room lechery reveals lack of respect
The sight of Richmond ruckman Mabior Chol being groped by his teammates was schoolboy locker room lechery. It was also pathetic, weird and we deserve better from our AFL players, writes Susie O’Brien.
Box office classics fail to capture iPhone generation
Movie night seems like the perfect way to get ourselves through stage four. But trying to introduce the iPhone generation to much-loved classics from the ‘80s has been a massive flop, writes Susie O’Brien.