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.”