Jamie on Christmas tips, Jools and Elvis
Mr Oliver makes Christmas food so very easy and reveals his dream guest list
Cooking for 14 adults plus daughters Poppy, 8, and Daisy, 9,
Petal, 2, and one-year-old Buddy, is just fine for an international
celebrity chef. Here he reveals his top tips, his dream dinner guests
and tells us just what Christmas in the Oliver household is like...
1.
Jamie: “It always is. We have about 14 adults, plus kids – mums, dads, in-laws, a few friends and waifs and strays.”
2.
Jamie: “I like to go online and download filthy jokes
to put in the crackers as well as good presents. One year I got an empty
box of viagra and filled it with smarties and put it in my nan’s
cracker and put hair growth cream in my dad’s.”
3.
Jamie: “I don’t want anything apart from a bit of peace
and quiet, really, and no arguing, no fighting. I haven’t got a
Christmas list. I’ve got to a point in my life when it’s more about what
other people want.”
4.
Jamie: “When my mum and dad bought me my first drum
kit. It was a Thunder three-piece from Freemans catalogue. To be honest
it was a piece of sh** – jam jars with cling-film over them – but it was
definitely the most exciting Christmas present I ever got. I was 11
years old. I have a proper drum kit now.”
5.
Jamie: “She bought me an incredible telescope, a proper
good one that talks to computers and satellites and I can see Jupiter
and Saturn and all the rings. I have it in Essex, the Oliver
observatory. Obviously for stars, I wouldn’t use it to be a peeping tom
(laughs).”
6.
Jamie: “To be honest we are a big Christmas family, so
every Christmas is pretty mega. The thing about ours is that not a lot
changes. Really, there’s the same rituals every year. On Christmas Day I
don’t want to sit around all day turning vegetables and reducing juice
and de-boning whole turkeys and rolling them into something. I want to
have a wicked roast, great gravy, tasty greens, good wine and make the
table look pretty, then have as much time playing with the kids and my
mates as possible.”
7.
Jamie: “Haven’t had one. Unless you’ve had someone pass
away, or going to f*** up the whole dinner which isn’t going to happen
with me because I can cook, I don’t think Christmas can be bad. The only
thing that’s happened, which is a bastard, is if kids go down and get
sick. It wrecks everything.”
8.
Jamie: “The thing is, at the end of the day probably
about 65 percent of the country don’t really cook that often from
scratch and the one time they all do it on the same day - Christmas day.
They don’t even have the warm up of Thanksgiving like they do in
America. So the truth is there’s lots of tears on Christmas because
people are not used to cooking from scratch.”
9.
Jamie: “In theory the turkey is difficult probably
because of the shape of the bird. It’s one of the harder meats to cook
because of their weird shape. If you’ve got a rib of beef or a filet or
topside or loin of pork or leg of lamb it’s more of a uniform shape, but
you’ve got a bloody great bottom bit of breast, good turkey, thin top,
it can go wrong if you don’t give it the love it requires. The trick is
to break it down to as simple a recipe as possible.”
10.
Jamie: “We have a turkey and a goose. I wouldn’t have
Christmas without turkey. Only 70 years ago it was more common to have a
goose but turkeys are so cheap and efficient to farm; you can’t
intensively farm geese, they won’t have it. Having done a goose last
year, it was absolutely spectacular so I’m having another one this
year.”
11.
Jamie: “Apart from beer? To be honest we have stuff
like the mixed nuts you get at Christmas. You warm them up and they’re
delicious. If I’m going to do nibbles, my fave thing is pate on grilled
toast.”
12.
Jamie: “Mince pies. I’m so fed up with mince pies in
every way possible. I’m so over the taste and texture, it bores me. If I
go to a party and somebody says, ‘Do you want a mince pie?’ I say, ‘No
thanks, I’ll have some extra wine instead.’”
13.
Jamie: “Ricky Gervais would be funny. I have had the
pleasure of meeting him a few times. Elvis would be nice, and it would
be nice to get John Lennon back for the day. I think he’d like my roast
potatoes being a good Northerner. Elvis would probably want to put
turkey in three bits of bread for a club sandwich.”
14.
Jamie: “Do turkey on the day and all the veg. One of
the keys actually, definitely for me, is to go for an 8 kilo turkey.
That’s as big as you want to go. I’d rather have two 6-8 kilo than a
bigger one. The bigger they get the harder it is to cook them to
perfection. Why make your life hard? It’s definitely a big tendency to
buy a massive turkey. Also, if you want crisp skin and delicate, moist
meat all the way through, you should stick to 6 kilos. It’s not that
bigger ones can’t be great, it’s just that the science behind the
cooking makes it tougher.”
15.
Jamie: “For the ultimate roast potatoes you should get
Maris Piper or King Edwards. Peel and cut them to just bigger than a
golf ball. Most important is to parboil them ‘til nearly cooked in
heavily salted water, til just undercooked. Drain, let them steam for
five minutes, then give them a shake so the first layer gets crumbled
and scratched up a bit, then get a nice big tray and put them in the
oven. Measure your oven and get the biggest roasting trays possible. Buy
two nice roasting trays as opposed to s**tty ones, which bend and kink
and give bad heat. They’re not mega-expensive about 15 quid and you’ll
have them for the rest of your life and they will make roasting potatoes
better. I just spoon out fat from the turkey. It’s naughty but nice, or
use olive oil.”
16.
Jamie: “You gotta have a whole load of nice greens, try
and make them taste bloody delicious, it’s not that hard. We have a
history of boiling the crap out of an army of vegetables so they end up
looking dry and steaming and opaque and miserable. Get a pan with
steamers above it - you can pick it up for about £30. Put medium-sized
carrots in water, then rack up all your veg above them to steam. Make
flavoured butters – you can do that even a month beforehand. I pick a
whole load of lovely greens in season for Christmas, cabbages, swiss
chard, curly kale and then whazzed up in a food processor - butter,
anchovies, chilli, lemon juice, rosemary. Squeeze that into greaseproof
paper and if you put it in the freezer it’ll keep for months and months.
Pop the greens in and half cook them the day before and cool them down.
Heat them up in a pan the next day and put a few knobs of flavoured
butter on them. Beautiful.”
