Feeding the baby: 5 foodie tips to help with your breastmilk supply

Harry and I had a tricky start on the breastfeeding front - as he was in NICU we weren't able to have an immediate attempt at feeding after he was born (first 6 hours are recommended) that would have been important in order to stimulate my milk supply. On the morning after he was born Mark found me on the post natal ward sobbing as I had no idea what to do in order to feed my baby as he was somewhere else in the building and I couldn't get there as I was still full of epidural and spinal block from the emergency c section. . And no one to help me do it either. Fortunately Mark wheeled me to NICU where the staff were only too happy to help and I was provided with a breast pump, steriliser and bottles to start expressing. Great I thought, (only no one told me I wouldn't have anything to express at that point - there was me expecting it just to happen...) and so started our journey to establish breastfeeding.

I'm really lucky now - well part of me's lucky and the other part has worked bloody hard to get a milk supply that's established enough for Harry to start putting on weight. I'm lucky because of the support I've had - a good friend who knows what she's doing, rocked up at the hospital with fruit, nipple shields and photocopied explanations of what we were going to do. I was instructed to eat plenty, drink lots and keep on expressing. And my friend sat with me, distracted me, and kept me going - because it wasn't easy. I expressed, I tried to feed, I fed, I slept, I ate, I drank all the water and I started the whole shebang again. And nearly fifteen weeks on it's getting much easier but my milk supply has needed some help so I just thought I'd note down some foodie things we've found helpful in increasing my milk:

• Fenugreek - God I hate this stuff, I won't use it when I'm cooking currys because I can just smell it everywhere for ever. However, in capsule form (I got mine from Holland and Barrett) it's a great supplement to help with breast milk - 2 capsules, 3 times a day. And if you swallow them quickly you can't taste them. 
• Fenugreek water - half a cup a day of the recipe in tomorrow's post (I dilute it in strongly flavoured juice as it's really strong tasting)
• Oats - porridge, Hobnobs, flapjacks, Orange barley water.
• Lots of fluids - I have a sports bottle that is permanently full or being drunk from so about to be refilled. I have no idea how much water I'm drinking a day, but lots is a good estimation
• EAT - largely healthy, but factor in treats also - but mainly just eat. You need to, otherwise milk production will suffer, and I just wouldn't have the energy to feed at all. It's tiring. Amazing, but tiring. 
• Don't be afraid to ask for help. And keep asking. I ask everyone if my latch is OK. I get Harry weighed at every opportunity. And I keep going to breastfeeding group. Tenacity and stubborness are good skills. 

I'm not a breastfeeding specialist, and this is just my experience, but these things were helpful for me and I hope they're helpful for you. If you have any other food based suggestions of ways to support breastfeeding, why not add them in the comments.

Olympics food and no-cook cooking activities for little ones

This summer a lot of our Brownie activities have been Olympics led - my unit are so excited about the Olympics badge (as am I, I can't wait to get it on my blanket, badge nerd that I am - isn't it pretty?)

Girlguiding UK's On Your Marks resource isn't just about sport, but also culture so some of the activities the girls chose to do in our pow wow were about food. I wasn't surprised! The activities they chose are ones that we know they love, but as the summer holidays are nearly upon us, I thought I'd add here in case anyone wants a healthy foodie afternoon that's an alternative to cake decorating and biscuit baking - which I admit would be my preferences but with our focus on healthy activity (as well as sport) introducing some more fruit can be a good thing.

One of the things our Brownies love to make is fruit kebabs. Now as with aforementioned new Guide and nuts, we have a Brownie who's allergic to kiwi and strawberries. Please be sure if you're a Leader to check your Join us forms or Go! to check before doing with your unit. If you're doing this at home, well I guess you know.

We choose lots of brightly coloured fruit - including different ones that the girls haven't seen before - typical choices are:

• Kiwi
• Strawberries
• Raspberries
• Pineapple
• Apple
• Pear
• Orange/ satsuma (our girls prefer smaller fruit as it's more manageable for little fingers)
• Starfruit
• Grapes
• Mango

Now having said that the girls won't have seen these before, it seems that few or even none of these are particularly different to your average 7 year old in North London - I think I would have fainted on sight of a mango at 7 in East London (but that was 26 years ago). Lots of units make fruit kebabs but we try and tie it in not just to healthy eating, but also to learning knife skills. When we go on Brownie holiday the girls take on the role of 'Cooks' with their six - in this role they help to peel and chop up potatoes, carrots (we whizz the onions in the food processor to prevent random breakouts of swimming goggles) fruit for puddings and elevenses and anything else that the girls have chosen as part of their menu.

In our weekly meetings we don't have time for all of that, but we do have a stash of coloured plastic chopping boards (which can be dishwashed) and what I would call paring knives. They're neither dangerously sharp nor dangerously blunt, and the boards have enough friction(?) that things aren't slipping around. We also put the boards on old teatowels that we routinely collect from time to time. We work with what I would call the 'bridge' technique of cutting. The girls hold the knife in their right hand (if right handed) and make a bridge with their left, holding the fruit in place, we then encourage them to chop the fruit into bite size peices. There's no expectation that the fruit will be chopped up evenly, there's no sense of their being a standard to meet. As in our promise each girl does "her best". Each type of fruit goes into it's own plastic (or disposable) bowl, and each girl has a kebab or cocktail stick.

For our Olympics challenge, the Brownies had to try and get a peice of fruit of each colour of the rings on their stick, with a second challenge that if there was a type of fruit you hadn't tried before then to add that one (even if it meant you had an extra ring). This all linked in to the Olympic value of Excellence.

excellence – how to give the best of oneself, on the field of play or in life; taking part; and progressing according to one’s own objectives

Now I'm no Mummy blogger but it's worth noting how rarely we have leftovers on Brownie holiday as the girls are proud to eat what they've made. This activity was the same, everyone tried everything - and the chatter on leaving was about their newly learned abilities to chop fruit. And I really do mean made - there's no sense of token 'helping' in the kitchen. It's also always a surprise that if we haven't started our holiday prep with a session on knife skills, the amount of girls who 'aren't allowed' to help out in the kitchen.

A couple of other thoughts I wanted to include about children and fruit that I've noticed over the years - should I qualify this by explaining that I've been Guiding in a leader role since the age of 14? I'm sometimes hyper aware that I'm not a Mum and I don't want anyone thinking I'm trying to teach them to suck eggs, or that I'm speaking out of turn.

• Children (and by that I mean those between 7 and 14) who won't eat a whole piece of fruit, will do so if it's chopped up. I frequently core and quarter apples and love that girls who nibble a whole apple for a long time and ask if they can leave it, will eat 6 peices of chopped up apple.
• I've already mentioned satsumas, easier to peel for little fingers, sweet to eat, less pips and again as they're little - lots of our girls will eat 2
• If we can't get smaller ones, half a banana is sometimes enough
• Now I can't take credit for this one, but our Division Commissioner has been known to scoot around the local Greek supermarkets and get a watermelon cheaply that we can then hack into peices for elevenses - the girls devour this in the same way they do marshmallows!
• If seedless grapes are on special I chop them up into small bunches
• Chopped up fruit is dressed(?) sprinkled(?) with lemon juice. This was a Hugh F-W tip that I shamelessly adopted a year or two back. In the same way my two units go crackers for Tanfasticks, they love fruit with lemon juice on it.

On holiday we always always have bowls of fruit and jugs of squash and water that the girls are encouraged to help them to at any point. They don't have to ask, all they have to do is wash their mug up themselves. We use a cleverly titled 'mug bin' on camp - yes literally, but it's never been used for rubbish, full of beakers, mugs with handles that the girls can help themselves to so there's no having to find your plate bag if you're gasping thirsty.

To keep the fruit and squash cool, another tip - old, clean net curtains. Yes, really. Dampen it down in cold water, and cover the fruit bowls and juice jugs, then dip one end in a washing up bowl of cold water. Voila! Camp fridge

And also we're not perfect - threesies (yes, it's a word) are always a biscuit or little cake. On Guide camp the girls bring their own, home-made ones - extra snaps this year to Mia and Anoushka who made stunning cupcakes and chocolate cake respectively - and we all have that with our drink and break in the afternoon.

Just a quick note: I'm away from home this week and without pictures, but wanted to get this up before the end of term.  All pictures used are from Google images.

Popping out for Valentines: Easy chocolate cake pops

Or what to do with leftover cake. I know, I know, who actually has leftover cake at any point in their life? But (and I blame the new medication) for some reason the cakes I made for M for Valentine's day, produced lots of offcuts as it were, and I had no desire to cram them into my mouth. Odd.

In lieu of gluttony, I remembered speaking to Michelle and Sarah at Let's Make Christmas (I would like to insert a little dance at me actually networking. My CBT counsellor would be so proud) about making cake pops with the Guides. And I thought, well this is clearly a perfect opportunity to have a go. There was a brief flurry of Googling, at dismay at the amount of blogposts dedicated to using cake mixes when twitter stepped in to save the day. I only really wanted proportions of buttercream to cake crumbs as when I had that straight in my head I wouldn't need a recipe per se.

Thankfully Kate of Cake Poppins stepped in to save the day with a suggested ratio of 2/3 cake crumbs, to 1/3 buttercream.

The cake recipe I had leftovers from is here, but any sponge recipe would do, and similarly if you're looking for an activity to do with Brownies or Guides, they could quite happily crumb economy cake from any of the big supermarkets and this would reduce the cost per head (and the time) quite considerably. I should also mention that I halved the cake I had left and have made 12 cake pops, the rest of the cake crumbs are happily in tupperware in the freezer awaiting another day.

This is the buttercream recipe I normally use (you can scale quantities up or down as necessary). I actually used leftover buttercream from the Valentines cakes as I had some in the fridge still.

125g butter, softened
500-750g icing sugar
75ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract (this recipe of mine is so old that says essence!)

Put the butter in a mixing bowl, add about half the sugar and the milk and vanilla.
Using an electric mixer beat until smooth and creamy (about 5 minutes) If you don't want the worktop and you to get dusty from the icing sugar then cover the bowl with a slightly damp teatowel
Taste and add the remaining sugar until its of a spreadable consistency
Colour if you want and substitute some of the icing sugar for cocoa or melted chocolate for chocolate buttercream.

Once your buttercream is made up, Mix it, spoon by spoon into the cake crumbs. you want a texture that binds together, not dissimilar to when you make truffles. Use about a teaspoon or two to make a ball shape, and once holding together nicely, insert a lolly stick (not all the way through). I asked my local Starbucks for some stirrers and they kindly let me take a handful. I know that in the Guide hut we have a stash of lolly sticks that we use for craft and these would work perfectly. Ours are donated from an ex Guiders boyfriend, but equally you could buy them from Hobbycraft or similar. I'm sure Baker Ross sell them.

Melt chocolate - anything you want, milk, white, dark, and dip the pops in so that they're coated nicely, leave to set. Sarah and Michelle gave me a fantastic tip here - use egg boxes, or florist's oasis to hold the pop sticks up nice and straight. Then you can either, roll in glitter, decorate with sprinkles, or drizzle on more chocolate.

Now the chocolate melting stage was where I hit an issue. I only had half a chocolate santa left in the house, I contemplated going out and getting some chocolate but I feel slightly odd today (odd in a precursor to a seizure way, rather than just usual oddness) so raided the cupboards to find half a jar of Sainsburys (not so) new Popping candy chocolate spread. Just the thing! I put two tablespoons in with the melted chocolate, let the heat from the bowl let it down so that it would coat the pops, and went ahead.

So easy, such wow potential. Cake Pops for Valentines. With leftover cake. What more could you ask for?

Get ahead Christmas: Jamie's gravy

Dear Reader, I thought I would start this post with a confession. I have more than a soft spot for Jamie Oliver. It was his recipes that got me interested in trying to cook new and different things. Before then I was very much a family cook in the same ilk as my Mum, but Jamie made things like Thai Green Curry and risotto accessible. I was still in the concious competence stage of learning to cook and believed I needed every ingredient and to follow recipes to the letter. Oh how times have changed. What hasn't has the soft spot for the Naked Chef. Whether he's revamping school dinners, or working with young people at Fifteen, I admire his social awareness, as well as his cooking. Oddly during the riots in the summer, I nearly got caught up in them by wanting to go and eat at his Italian in Birmigham, thankfully a burly Police Officer dissuaded me of that plan!

So Saturday afternoon just gone I was found bashing 7 bells out of chicken wings, veg and spices in the name of Jamie's gravy. Mum had wanted to try it, and when I read that you could make it ahead and freeze it I was won over. Whilst as I've already said this week, that Christmas dinner is just a roast - albeit as one commenter mentions, with a paper hat - getting things done ahead of time will reduce the amount of space I need on the oven or hob, which is a huge tick when you're working in a tiny kitchen, and also it's one less thing to worry about. I just need to get it out of the freezer the night before and heat it through with the turkey juices for extra flavour. That said, if you don't fancy any faffing on Christmas day it really doesn't need it, this gravy really packs a punch.

I haven't got a copy of the recipe to hand, and made 2 batches together so this makes a lot - I would say enough for 12-16 (more if you're feeding littlies) the Pantry take on Jamie's Gravy.

Jamie & Penelope's festive gravy

2 onions, peeled and quartered
4 sticks celery roughly chopped
4 carrots, roughly chopped
Handful of rosemary sprigs
Handful of sage leaves
Some bay leaves (fresh if you have a bay tree. Santa, if you're listening?)
16 chicken wings, bashed a bit
Salt
Pepper
Olive Oil
8 tablespoons flour (I used cornflour, that's just what we had, I wasn't being cheffy!)
4 litres water, recently boiled
120 ml sherry

Put the veg and herbs in a roasting tin, and top with the bashed up chicken wings (I put them in a sandwich bag and hit them with a rolling pin)
Sprinkle with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil
Cook in a gas mark 6 oven for about an hour - until it's nicely cooked but not burnt. In Mum's oven this took an hour and a half
Put your roasting tin on the hob, and light a burner. With a potato masher bash 7 bells out of the contents of the roasting tin, until it's pretty much a mush. I kept turning the roasting tin around as one burner didn't heat all of it, and two was too much for me to manage.
Add your flour and keep bashing until it's all combined
Add the water and sherry and stir in so that everything is all covered
Turn up the heat, bring to a gentle boil
Turn down the heat and simmer for about half an hour
I was shattered then, so we covered it and left it overnight before draining through first a colander and then a seive into large bowls.
This made 4 pints of amazing gravy. We froze them in freezer bags flat so they take up less room in the freezer and defrost quickly.

A note from mum and I, this smelt (so I'm told) amazing at the end of roasting, and I could easily have eaten it as a dinner. I suspect it's going to taste like a roast dinner in itself. It's thick and luscious.

Another note, if you used thighs not wings and stopped after roasting this would make an amazingly simple and tasty dinner.

Another another note, if you stripped the meat off the bones after cooking and blitzed with a stick blender, then added the water this would make the most amazingly healing soup.

Because of room, I'm just going to heat this through and add a few spoons of turkey juices to it, but mum is going to reheat hers in the turkey pan (after draining off the fat) I have no doubt hers will be amazing, but I'm going for the easy to manage with one working arm option.

Apologies for lack of photos, but mushed up veg really isn't that pretty. I'll work on that.

Easy Christmas stuffing

So it's now 5 days until Christmas, how are you feeling? Have the children broken up from school yet? Or did they break up last week and have already declared themselves as bored? This post is a recipe - shocker I know, and also a way to get ahead ready for the weekend that family can help with - both Guides and Brownies (so 7-14) really enjoy the ickiness of helping out with this. One more thing to tick off that to do list.

Stuffing. I love it, it's not a roast without it - which is how Mark feels about Yorkshire puddings. My lovely sister (the gorgeous one in the picture up top) is half of the inspiration for this recipe. Last Christmas she made a fruited stuffing from scratch and I really enjoyed it. She won't be with us this Christmas as she's at her inlaws, but when I pop this in the oven I'll be thinking of her.

However this version is becoming known as Division Commissioner stuffing. And to explain that I have to tell you a little story. Two years ago I applied for my Guide holiday licence, prepped a GFI Glamorama themed holiday and worked incredibly hard to make it a success. Alison, our Division Commissioner was our QM - who saw I had bought a leading brand of dried stuffing and promptly declared "we won't be using that!" At this point she knocked up stuffing for 20 people using 'stuff' lying around the Guide kitchen. I was slightly gobsmacked to say the least. And it was yummy, much wetter than packet stuffing ever is. Fast forward 2 years and the older guides in a much bigger Guide unit wanted to know if we were having Alison's stuffing? So I picked up the phone and got the recipe. Well I say recipe, it's more of a guideline.

Now for Guides I made this vegetarian, leaving out the sausage meat, however for Christmas in our house it is firmly carnivourous, and I used skinned lincolnshire sausagemeat to increase the herbed flavours, if you like  it peppery try cumberland, and if you prefer a simple flavour then any good pork sausagemeat will be great. I get mine from the butchers around the corner, as they make their own sausages and the quality is immense. If I were using one from a Supermarket it would be a Sainsbury's TTD as they are amazing quality (and gluten free)

I should say, that this is a really easy recipe for children to help with. Use the food processor if you're not happy letting them loose with knives. I would use the food processor with my Brownies, but with supervision my Guides are fine with knives. Make sure their hands are clean and get them to smush up the sausagemeat.

Division Commissioner's Stuffing (this quantity serves about 8, it doubles or even triples beautifully)

2 onions, blitzed in the food processor
25g butter
1 Bramley apple, peeled, cored and diced (I confess, I blitzed it with the onions)
800g Lincolnshire sausages, skinned and smushed up
Handful of sage leaves, chopped up
4-6 slices of stale brown/ wholemeal/ granary bread, crusts cut up and blitzed into breadcrumbs

Fry the onion in the melted butter until it starts to soften
Add the apple and cook for a little while longer
Leave the pan on one side to cool down (it need to be easily handle-able)
Mix with the remaining ingredients and seasoning - do this with clean hands in a big bowl
Make into balls and put on a buttered baking tray, and cook for about half an hour

If I'm doing this at home I then pack it into a foil lined 1kg loaf tin and freeze it until it's needed.
Take it out of the freezer on Christmas eve, and when defrosted, cook as above but for about 40 minutes.

If you want a veggie version, add extra apple and onion and breadcrumbs to make up the weight.

This is what we're having on Christmas Day with our turkey. Just think if you make it today (you could easily sub the apples for eating apples and use any sausagemeat you have in the house), freeze it you don't need to even think about it again until Saturday evening.

Christmas week hints and tips: It's just a roast

I don't have any photos of me red-faced and sweating over the stove, (although I do have these over a fire, but how many people are about to attempt their Christmas roast on an altar fire?) but if I did that would be an attractive and appropriate shot, for here. Because that's how so many people feel this Christmas week, all of a sudden flinging the need for 'perfection' around the kitchen and the interwebs as we prepare to be descended on, en masse by our nearest and dearest. You know, those that love us most, those who ate the pies we made up in foil containers when we were insisting aged 6 they play 'Restaurant' with us (true story folks, you heard it here first).

Now, I may have mentioned once or twice on here, facebook and twitter that this year is a bit odd for me, for a number of reasons:

1. For the first time I'm cooking, for someone else's family. I mean, with any luck they'll be mine too one day. But right now? They're his. And his mum? Can cook. We're talking WI here. Damn.
2. I have my right arm in plaster. Chopping? Nope, Dicing? Nope, Kneading? Nope, Doing that thing where you put butter under the turkey skin? Not a chance.
3. No one needs me to bake. This is all cooking. Proper cooking. Savoury stuff.
4. Mark has a small house. From the kitchen everyone can hear me scream.
5. As I type this I have a streaming cold and no sense of smell
6. Mark has the smallest kitchen in the history of the world, and no accessible window for an emergency exit.

When I first typed these out, I considered pouring a very large sherry, leaving the country or eating my own bodyweight in Christmas cake (I still have 2 in the kitchen). So I called my Mother... here is the rough transcript of our conversation:

• Me: Ican'tdoitJoancancookthey'llallhearmeandthere'snomusictosingalongto. WHY DID I OFFER?
• Mother: Oh stop fussing, it's just a roast, you've been cooking those since you were at Brownies.
• Me: Did you not hear me? These are my possible future inlaws. MY WHOLE WORLD MAY BE ABOUT TO COLLAPSE (when stressed I go in for capitals and overstatement)
• Mother: Yes, now if you put the kettle on we'll do a list.
• Me: A what? I've done the shopping, the menu's planned... what are we going to put on a list?
• Mother: taps nose... (well I imagine she did) wait and see.

So here you have Mother Morris' list of wondrousness:

Penelope's Pantry Christmas cooking/ menu plan

Make ahead and freeze:

Stuffing*
Gravy *

Prep ahead:

• Get the stuffing out Christmas Eve 
• Potatoes, parsnips, carrots (Delegate these to Mark on Christmas Eve)
• Bread overnight in breadmaker
• Sausages in bacon (get bacon out of freezer Friday night, roll up around sausages on Saturday)
• Turkey can be prepped with a herb butter, clementine, carrot and onion in cavity on Christmas Eve, then wrapped in foil and put in fridge/ somewhere cold
• Put Christmas Pudding in slow cooker on Christmas Eve, add 1 pint of water in main dish, turn on timer switch so it goes on at 6am Christmas Day (I will still be in bed at 6am let me assure you)
• Ask Mark's mum to make brandy butter
• Put wine in fridge (a Guide mum gave me a bottle of Prosecco as a thank you last week, I shall be adding a splash of sloe gin to mine)

I thought about what Mum had said and realised, that I have been helping with the roast since Brownies, and certainly making most of it since I was about 9. And Christmas dinner is just that. A roast. Albeit a big one, with lots of trimming, it's still. Just. A. Roast. Most of my friends will attest to the fact that I can knock up a roast anywhere, for 4 to 24 people, over a fire, in the rain, while drinking, in the world's tiniest kitchen. I'm not saying Christmas dinner is going to be a walkover, but you know what - I can take some of the pressure off myself and make it much easier by remembering that fact alone.

When you take all of those extra bits that I've seen people try and do on Christmas morning, with no help, whilst trying to remain tidy, it does just become a roast dinner, that most people could make stood on their heads.

Other tips:

• Don't stuff your turkey, cook the stuffing separately, in balls, in a loaf tin/ pyrex dish (butter it first to make it easy to wash up). How you want. Nowhere does it say in the bible that Turkey must be stuffed
• Use your freezer, I have made the gravy and the stuffing already (It's a week before Christmas as I'm typing this) I did them both when I had time and popped them in the freezer where they'll stay till I need them
• Christmas pudding was made in half term, it's currently maturing with Mark's parents, they'll bring it. Mr Crock Pot will cook it/ keep it warm until we want it.
• I have a dripping cup I use to make my roasties - each time I finish a roast, I tip the leftover fat from the roasting tin into an old mug. This lives in my fridge and each time I roast I empty it and refill it. It makes amazing roasties. I never shell out for goose fat. (Although I do love my Mum's roasties that she uses foose fat for). This is more of a cost thing as I was astounded that the supermarket were selling goose fat at £5.99 for a tin the other day. Gobsmacked
• Remember that it's December - it's cold outside, put bottles of wine, Schloer, orange juice etc in a box outside if you've got the space and it's safe. We've put ours on the back step for YEARS. Randomly we also have one cupboard that is much cooler than anywhere else in the kitchen, we use this at Christmas as an extension of the fridge/ a traditional pantry. If you have a secure garden, use a crate with a squirrel proof lid as a fridge extension too (unless you're in Australia/ New Zealand, Then you need a box covered witha big bit of muslin/ net curtain with one end sat in a bowl of cold water. Voila! Camp fridge.)
• Christmas dinner is a big meal. You really don't *need* a starter.
• Boyfriends (non cooking OHs) were designed to peel vegetables. When I'm training new managers we look at why people don't delegate - it's all about control. The sureness that no one can do it as well as you. Quite frankly if the end result is there when I need it to be, I don't care how people get there - those are their choices to worry about.It's one meal in the year, if it all goes haywire you'll have something to talk about come Easter.
• Sherry is a girl's best friend. I need it for the gravy (hic)
• Have a bowl of hot soapy water in the sink all the time. Even if you have a dishwasher. It just makes life easier.
• Don't pick now as the day to try every new recipe you've seen on telly this month - if you want to reinvent yourself as Jamie Oliver then do as much as you can ahead, and if not, subject someone you love to a practice Christmas dinner in advance. Those episodes of Come Dine with Me where it's a disaster because they're doing something FOR THE FIRST TIME on their episode. Don't let that be you
• That said, feel free to experiment a bit. Don't buy clementines to put one in the turkey when no one likes them. Retrieve the lemon from your gin and use that. Don't race out on Christmas eve thinking you'll get cramberries, buy them now. And make Nigella's cornbread stuffing, or Christmas morning muffins with them

Please don't think I'm saying I know it all/ have it all/ can do it all. I just think that taking a step back and delegating/ organising/ making a list won't hurt, and may make life a bit easier. I know someone who one Christmas smashed pretty much all of her Mum's crystal because she had told her to be careful, and worried over her the whole time she was washing up. Yet forgot to mention that crystal hates hot hot washing up water. Another Christmas the oven door jammed, had to be released with a screwdriver and a hammer. Another Christmas the stuffing was found 4 days later in the top oven. My first 'Christmas dinner' I cooked with my friend Nicki at uni, I was convinced we had poisoned people as the dark meat was well, dark... these were not disasters. The only disaster was the first Christmas after my Dad died when I waited for him to ring and tell me it was a mistake. Culinary cock-ups do not count as disasters, they are all things we laugh about.

Enjoy your day. Enjoy your time with your family. Raise a glass to those loved ones who aren't with you for whatever reason.

Remember: It's just a roast. Use this as your mantra whilst necking sherry if necessary.