Top tips for a great Christmas dinner

Dec 4 2008 by Janet Tansley, Liverpool Echo

Christmas dinner 250

Janet Tansley finds out ways to prepare the perfect Christmas dinner

THE shops are full of decorations and supermarkets around the city have started to sell turkeys – the Christmas countdown has begun. Over the next few weeks, Christian Grall, executive chef at Heathcotes in Anfield, will give us his top tips on how to prepare for Christmas.

And, more importantly, he’ll tell us how to avoid the annual cooking panic.

“It’s easy to worry about how your Christmas Day cooking is going to go but there really is no need to,” says Christian who has worked at the club for the past seven years.

“At this stage, just weeks before, you can be busy preparing, making your Christmas cake or pudding, the stuffing, wrapping your sausages to make pigs in blankets and also mince pies.”

Christian, who is originally from Brittany, has been busy preparing hundreds of Christmas dinners in his LFC kitchen, as the team at Heathcotes in Anfield get ready to help people to celebrate their Christmas parties.

It is predicted that the 40-year-old along with his two headchefs, 35 match-day chefs and dozens of kitchen porters, will be serving more than 4,000 dinners this month.

Father-of-two Christian says: “We have been planning very much in advance.

“We try to offer guests a taste of Christmas the traditional way, complete with all of the trimmings. That is one of the great things about this job – one day you are serving 20 directors a meal before they watch a match and the next day, you are plating up hundreds upon hundreds of dishes of delicious festive food.”

Christian, who has also worked in some of London’s top restaurants and hotels, would suggest that now is the perfect time to start thinking about your turkey or goose.

He says: “You can either order one from your butcher, preferably free range, or you can buy a frozen one from any local supermarket.

“And don’t forget, if you're planning to order a large turkey, measure your oven first to make sure it will fit. That’s the last thing you need on Christmas morning, discovering your meat won’t even go in the oven.”