Trying not to stress about Christmas (1 of 2)

(Trying hard to Let go of perfectionism)

When I first started doing cookery demos, I was TERRIFIED. The thought of talking and cooking at the same time with all the potential for things to go wrong - well, it could keep me awake for nights on end.

It is a very different story today. One of the first things I say when I do a cookery demo of any sort, but especially a pressure cooking demo, is “something will go wrong.” It always does. I think a few of you can attest to this! When you are talking in front of a lot of people, and trying to field questions and cook, there is a lot to juggle. I often get distracted and forget to set timers, or to add ingredients, sometimes I struggle to work an unfamiliar induction hob, or don’t know quite what temperature I need to maintain pressure. Sometimes I have to deal with people heckling or being unruly (rare, but it happens). But the thing is, it never really matters, especially if you can laugh about it and show your audience that it isn’t the end of the world. They still end up with something that tastes good even if it isn’t always exactly how I, with all my perfectionist tendencies, would want it to be.

It struck me a while back, decades too late for my cortisol levels, that this attitude of not stressing when things go wrong is something that I should apply to cooking generally - especially with entertaining and Occasion meals such as Christmas lunch. (I don’t include recipe development and testing in here, for obvious reasons). And I wished I had been able to have it back in my early adult years. In those days, before I had even thought seriously about making a career in food, I had to cook and entertain a lot. My menus were stupidly ambitious and elaborate, with lots of scope for mishap. And mishaps there were. I would vastly underestimate how long it was going to take me to finish cooking in between courses, keeping people captive at a table for far longer than they wanted to be (the chairs were not comfortable). I would apologise endlessly and agonise over every mistake. Eventually someone took me to task over this, and told me that it spoiled everyone’s enjoyment of the meal. They were right. Evermore afterwards I tried to cultivate a “laugh and learn” attitude. With varying degrees of success but it did at least inspire me into my first foray into food writing - a blog called “Blue Soup”, all about celebrating and learning from my Bridget Jones-esque failures.

And for a long time, Christmas in particular felt fraught. Disasters of varying degrees abounded. These were often more about people than food, or a collision of differing expectations, see the anecdote below, but for many years it felt impossible not to take any mishap - regardless of type or origin - really badly. Issues with ovens - the Rayburn going cold on the day the back up oven exploded happened to my mum on Christmas. In turn I have in the past dealt with a sluggish Aga with no alternative cooking source - not at all conducive to stress free cooking. The first Christmas in my current house, the oven fuse tripped and we didn’t realise for ages that the only heat was residual and nothing was cooking as expected. The illnesses - cooking dinner when ill with flu for a house full because no one else felt able to use the Aga. Cancelling it altogether 2 years in a row because of COVID (one year the capon went into the freezer and came out the following December and because no one wanted a full Christmas dinner, I cooked it and we feasted on it for a whole week before Christmas and ate something entirely different on the day). Then there are all the breakages - like the time I spent ages making a jar of duck confit to take to Cornwall for the Christmas Gumbo (the children’s request), only to drop the jar and smash it all over the hard slate floor.

One of the hardest Christmasses was back when I was in my mid 20s and was a combination of the stress of me cooking Christmas dinner on my own for the first time while trying to understand the difficult and complicated dynamics of my new (now ex) partner’s family. This is something faced by a lot of people, I know, but that particular Christmas I was totally out of my depth - way too young to deal with it maturely. It was my first ever Christmas away from my parents. I was living with the man I was to marry a couple of years later. I’m referring to him as my ex husband for the rest of this anecdote. He had a very large family and we were hosting most of them at various points over the Christmas and New Year. Christmas dinner was relatively small - just us, plus 2 other adults and 2 young children. I was quite excited about it - I had made countless roast dinners over the years (the first, supervised, when I was just 7 or 8 and my mum had broken her foot) and assumed that it would be the same. In truth, it should have been, but the weight of expectations and the desire to do absolutely everything, and the fact that I was hostess to adults all older than me made it feel very different. I still had too much to do on Christmas Eve so none of the prep - traditionally done by me and my mum listening to the King’s College Lessons - was done. I also hadn’t taken into account that I was cooking in a vastly different kitchen. A tiny galley kitchen with a very small oven, not big enough to hold more than just the turkey. It had not occurred to me that I would need to cook things consecutively rather than simultaneously.

It was not helped by the fact that the other adults attending had always had dinner cooked by their mother, had never ventured into the kitchen to help and therefore had the expectation that their roles were to sit around all morning. The mother of the two children had also just split up from her partner. The children got up that morning and were faced with so many over-compensatory presents, they got bored of opening them which immediately made everyone a bit cross. I had got up at 5am to start cooking Christmas lunch but had to stop to make a big breakfast too, and to make way for everyone wanting to make tea and coffee (the kitchen was big enough for 2, just).

By around 2pm, I was getting close. No one had lifted a finger to help all day, except my ex husband who had just about managed to get the table set and kept everyone in drink. I was fine to middling, heading for choppier waters by that point and feeling slightly resentful - I had not expected to be doing this single handedly but was not brave enough to ask for help. I wasn’t quite panicking as dinner was usually 3pm at home. But I was also very aware that everyone else in the house was used to sitting down much earlier so were getting fed up. Before I was ready to start warming up serving dishes, they were all seated at the table. Within minutes, they had started pounding with cutlery and chanting “why are we waiting.” It was too much. I started crying behind the kitchen door, before pulling myself together and getting the dinner out.

So, I had literally just placed the last dish on the table, sat down, picked up my glass, my ex husband was carving the turkey and everyone had started serving themselves everything else, when the children’s mother decided it was a good time to call her ex to find out when he would be coming to pick the children up. They had a row, the children started crying. She ran upstairs in tears. Her brother lost his temper because she’d “ruined everything” and he stormed off upstairs too. My ex husband and I were sitting there looking at one another, mouthing “What just happened?”, trying to comfort the children and get them to eat something. It felt like sabotage, not the thoughtless bad timing it actually was. A few hours later there was a drift down from the upstairs and lots of microwaved platefuls passed around. Silver lining: lots more leftovers than usual.

This was not quite the end of it - there was also a stress clean of the kitchen because of the family party we were hosting the next day (his family was full of cleaning obsessed neat freaks, who JUDGED), the oven door somehow getting smashed, which caused a row between me and my ex husband and meant a lot of the food I had planned for the party could not be cooked; when faced with various leftovers (all I really wanted but they apparently didn’t) and the various things I could cobble together without the oven, there were lots of jokes about going to McDonalds. Then despite everything being spotless, a future in-law - as I soon learned, always to be relied upon for a put down if not full on lobbing of hand grenade - walked into the kitchen, opened the (half empty) bin and said, “you are just like xxxx (ex husband’s ex wife), she never knew how to empty a bin, either.” I wanted to kill.

I know how I would handle all of this now, but at the time I was that classic mix of youthful insecure/self absorbed, desperate for his family to like me, and it all felt personal. How dare people bring their own personal baggage to my Christmas! My wish and expectation, unrealistic as it was, for a perfect Christmas, had been ruined. I spent the morning - not to mention the days of planning, shopping etc. - cooking a dinner no one appreciated, and the rest of the day cleaning for the following day’s party. Of course I had empathy - I felt really sorry for the children and their mother - but I felt aggrieved too. I am sure I had a bit of the martyr in me.

I’d like to say that I learnt everything I needed to learn from that one Christmas. Of course I didn’t. Older self could give younger self a pep talk. DON’T make it all about you. DON’T be a perfectionist. DON’T set yourself impossible goals. (see earlier post on everything I thought I’d be able to get done prior to my hospital visit. I have had to let so much slide and I don’t even really care). LOWER your expectations - of yourself, of everyone else, of the meal, of the day. Don’t expect people to be nicer because it is Christmas - the reverse is often the case. Take the stress out of it AND - and this took me a very long time to learn - ASK FOR HELP. Don’t wait for people to offer. Delegate - and - perhaps hardest of all, if they don’t do it quite to your standard LET IT GO.

I am learning a lot about the latter at the moment, as I am still spending most of my time in bed and can’t cook, just a bit of supervision. I tell myself how good this is for me. It is hard. But back to Christmas, you will be happier, and everyone else will be happier if you can be less stressed because then you won’t be spreading stress.

The later Christmases within that particular family dynamic were better - even the ones with upwards of 20 people around the table - even the ones where we hosted the ex wife, who I actually really liked. The Christmases of today with a completely different family - my own, with traditions forged together as my current partner Shariq was brought up in a Muslim household - are very different. Much lower key and pared back, with a real enjoyment of the build up and aftermath which we all enjoy more, and a very relaxed Christmas Day - more of this in another post. But - segue onto today’s recipe - one thing I have dropped from earlier Christmases which I really enjoyed was a Christmas Eve tradition of getting Chinese takeaway food. In the early noughties I had moved to Norfolk and the local Chinese restaurant in Watton was run by a lovely Belgian/Chinese couple who had a fantastic chef - the recipe for my ribs in my first pressure cooker book are based on his 7 hour ones. Anyway, it was decided one Christmas that to make things easy we would get takeaway from them on Christmas Eve so I could concentrate on prep. It became a tradition and always included duck pancakes - there is a recipe for them in Modern Pressure Cooking if you are so inclined. But ever since those days I have associated those flavours with Christmas Eve.

So here is a bit of a fusion dish for you. Christmassy red cabbage, duck, Chinese 5 spice, ginger…and lots of colour too. The pomegranates are there because I had them and everyone wanted them. You should definitely eat it at some point over the holidays - it works as a leftover dish, you can even replace the duck with leftover turkey (include some skin).

Duck and Red Cabbage Noodles

You can use confit duck, or crispy duck, or pork, or chicken or turkey or even cooked and sliced up pigs in blankets in this recipe if you like - you just won’t need to render out the fat as it is. And I suggest noodles, but rice will also work. Try the sesame rice in Everyday Pressure Cooking, which you can also find here. The liquid added stops it from being a dry noodle dish, but falls short of a soup. You can always add more liquid if you like, but I personally don’t think it works as well.

1 tbsp olive oil

2 duck breasts, skin scored and rubbed with salt

1 onion, finely chopped

1 small red cabbage

15g piece ginger, cut into matchsticks

4 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1/2 tsp Chinese 5 spice

1/2 tsp chilli flakes

Juice of 1 orange

50ml ginger wine (optional)

250ml chicken stock

1 tbsp dark soy sauce

1 tbsp rice vinegar

1 orange, segmented (optional)

To serve:

4 nests of noodles, cooked (you can cook these in the pressure cooker - split in half, vertically, put in the pressure cooker with a little oil and almost cover with water. Season, bring up to high pressure and immediately fast release. Break up with chop sticks or a fork.

A drizzle of sesame oil

A few sprigs coriander, parsley and/or mint (or any combination of)

A few red chillies, sliced

4 spring onions, sliced or shredded

A few tablespoons pomegranate arils