All can say about it is that both Chris and I were hugely impressed with the meat.  It was tender and juicy and delicious.  I also thought the accompanying sauce was fabulous but Chris was a bit less taken by it.  To be fair I let the liquid evaporate too quickly and the onions ended up caramelising and slightly burning on the bottom of the pan.  My advice is to keep a close eye on it to stop this happening since it tends to overpower the flavours of the sauce, although it still tastes good – it just looks a bit like a Balti sauce if it turns too dark.

Paleo pork cooked in coconut milk

Ingredients (serves 3-4):
800g leg or shoulder joint of pork, boned
1 tbsp olive oil
25g butter
1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
75g bacon (streaky or back, smoked or unsmoked – your preference!), chopped
1x400g can coconut milk
2 bay leaves
2 tbsp dried oregano or thyme (or a mix of both)

Directions:

1. Cut the layer of skin and fat off the joint and, using string, tie the joint together neatly.
2. Heat the oil and butter in a large pan.  Add the onion, garlic and bacon into the pan and cook them for a couple of minutes until softening.
3. Add the pork to the pan and cook, turning occasionally, until browned all over.
4. Put the coconut milk into a measuring jug and top up with water to 2 pints.  Pour the coconut milk and water mixture over the pork, add the bay leaves and herbs and cook uncovered on a low heat at a simmer (so that the liquid slowly evaporates) for 1.25 – 1.5 hours (I simmered a 1kg joint for 1 hour 45 mins with slightly more liquid).  Turn the joint halfway through cooking to make sure the top side doesn’t dry out and for the last 15-30 minutes keep a close eye on the pan and top up with a little more water if it is looking like it is about to boil dry.

At the end of cooking time remove the pork from the pan, leave to stand for 5-10 minutes and then slice the meat and place on a serving plate.  Pour over the sauce from the pan (this should be creamy with lumps of the bacon and onion in it) and serve up immediately.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: Cockles in Coconut Milk (Macunim ao Coco)
2. Paleo recipes: spicy pork scratchings
3. Paleo recipes: pot-roasted pork in white wine with garlic, fennel and rosemary

This works particularly well served up with vegetable noodles.

Paleo (primal) seafood medley

Ingredients (serves 2):
400g peeled and cooked mixed seafood (prawns, mussels, squid, scallops etc)
75g butter
1 pinch saffron powder or ground turmeric
rind and juice of ½ lemon
½ litre vegetable stock
30ml white wine vinegar
75ml double (heavy) cream, at room temperature

Directions:

1. Remove the cream from the fridge before starting to bring it to room temperature.
2. Melt the butter in a large frying pan, add the seafood and cook for 1-2 minutes.
3. Season the seafood with a little pepper, add the saffron, lemon juice and rind and mix together well.
4. Remove the seafood from the pan to a small dish and set aside somewhere to keep warm.
5. Add the vegetable stock to the pan, bring to the boil and reduce the stock by a third.  Add the vinegar and boil for a further 4 minutes until reduced.
6. Reduce the liquid to a gentle simmer, stir in the cream and leave to simmer for a final 2 minutes.
7. Plate up the seafood and pour over the sauce before serving.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: mussels in a garlic cream sauce (primal)
2. Paleo recipes: leek and sweet potato gratin
3. Paleo recipes: braised fennel

My preference is to use courgettes but you can also use any member of the squash family for this.

Paleo noodles

Ingredients:
1 large courgette per person

Directions:

1. Remove and discard the ends of each courgette.
2. Some people peel the skin off the vegetable.  If it is marrow or squash, which has a thicker and tougher skin, I would do this, but with a courgette the skin is relatively soft and I like the slight green colour added by leaving the skin in place.  If you would like to peel the vegetable, peel it at this stage.
3. Thinly slice each courgette lengthways, then split the slices into two piles on the chopping board and thinly slice lengthways again across the previous cuts, leaving a pile of thin strands of courgette flesh.
4. Place the strands in a pan, cover with boiling water (or bring a pan of water to the boil and add the strands once the water is ready) and simmer for 4 – 5 minutes until the strands are tender.  How long it takes will depend on how finely you managed to cut the courgettes!

When ready, drain the strands and serve up like noodles or spaghetti.

No related posts.

Paleo pork chops in a spicy sauce

Ingredients (serves 2 or 4, depending on how many chops you eat):
3 tbsp olive oil
4 pork chops
2 onions, thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
2 fresh green chillies, seeded and chopped
1 inch piece of ginger root, peeled and chopped (or 1 tsp ground ginger)
1 ½ tsp cumin seeds
1 ½ tsp ground coriander
1 pint water
2 tbsp tomato purée
4 tbsp double cream (optional)

Directions:

1. Heat the oil in a pan and fry the pork chops until sealed and browned on both sides.  Remove from the pan and set aside.
2. Add the onion, garlic, chillies, ginger and spices to the pan, fry gently for a couple of minutes until the onion is starting to brown.
3. Add the water and tomato puree, bring to the boil, place the pork chops on top.  Cover the pan and simmer over a medium heat for 30 minutes.
4. If using the cream, remove it from the fridge 10 minutes before the end of cooking time to warm up to room temperature before cooking.
5. If using cream, remove the chops from the pan, stir the cream into the sauce in the pan and then return the chops.  Cover the pan again and heat through gently on a low heat for a further 5 minutes.
6. Serve up the pork chops with the sauce while still hot.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: honey glazed pork
2. Paleo recipes: Chinese pork stir-fry
3. Paleo recipes: mussels in a garlic cream sauce (primal)

Paleo pine nut stuffed chicken thighs

Ingredients (serves 2):
4 large chicken thighs (or 6 small thighs)
Juice of 1 large lemon
2 spring onions, chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
3 tbsp pine nuts
1 tbsp coriander leaves, roughly chopped

Directions:

1. First prepare the chicken thighs.  Remove the bone by cutting down the length and carefully removing the bone, leaving the chicken thigh as a long flat strip of chicken.  Place the chicken in a dish and pour over a third of the lemon juice, moving the chicken about and turning it to cover the meat all over with the juice.  Cover and leave in a cool place for 20 minutes to flavour the meat.
2. Using a hand blender, blend together the pine nuts, spring onions, garlic, remaining lemon juice (approximately two-thirds of a lemon) and herbs.  If you don’t have a hand blender then crush the pine nuts using a pestle and mortar and then add the other ingredients, finely chopped, and blend as thoroughly as possible.
3. Put the oven on to preheat to 180C.
4. When the chicken is marinated, lay the pieces out on a board, cut-side upwards, and lay a teaspoon or two of the stuffing in a line across the centre of the thigh (where the bone was).  Roll the chicken thighs back into their original shape around the stuffing and hold together using a poultry skewer or cocktail sticks.
5. Cut a large piece of foil, lay the stuffed chicken in the centre of the foil, drizzle over any remaining lemon juice from marinating the chicken, and then bring together the edges of the foil to seal the chicken in a neat package.  Place the package in the centre of the oven and bake for 35 minutes.
6. When done, remove the package and carefully unseal it.  There is likely to be hot liquid and steam inside so take care not to scald yourself.  Discard the liquid, as this is mostly water from the chicken.  The skewers can be removed before serving as the chicken should hold its shape round the stuffing once it has been cooked.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: quick-cook chicken, mushroom and spinach
2. Paleo recipes: chicken stir-fry
3. Paleo recipes: stuffed lamb hearts

Paleo chinese pork stir-fry

Ingredients (serves 2):
2 thick pork loins or boned pork chops
1 ½ tbsp honey
1 ½ tbsp dry sherry
1 tsp Chinese 5 spice powder
½ tsp ground ginger
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1 bell pepper, seeded and thinly sliced lengthways
1 carrot, thinly sliced (I found a mandolin useful for this)

Directions:

1. Put the dry spices into a wide bowl, add the honey and then the sherry over this and then blend together thoroughly using the back of a spoon.  Slice the pork into thin strips and add it into the bowl with the honey mixture.  Mix well, cover and leave in a cool place to marinade for 20 minutes, mixing it around a couple of times to re-coat the pork.
2. When the meat has marinated, heat some oil in a wok and add the vegetables.  Keep the heat high and move the vegetables around until they start to soften.
3. Once the vegetables are almost soft make a space in the centre of the pan and place the meat into this (be sure not to pour the marinade liquid in with it, otherwise the pork will boil in the liquid).  Keep the meat moving about until it is browned all over, mixing it in with the vegetables as you work.
4. Add the marinade liquid to the pan, coat everything with the liquid and leave to simmer for 3-4 minutes until the pork is cooked through.
5. Serve immediately while still piping hot.

Related posts:

1. Paleo recipes: honey glazed pork
2. Paleo recipes: pork, mushroom and leek casserole
3. Paleo recipes: March pork casserole

I hope all my reader’s have had a break over the Festive period and are feeling enthused for a fresh start on 2012, just as I am.  2011 was a tough year for me.  I knew that I would be giving up my full-time job at the end of the year moving to a more mixed role of full-time musician to bring in the money that I need with the aim of a five-day “weekend” from Monday to Friday to take me away from the desk, give me more time to be active and mobile, leave me with time to train, and remove as much stress as possible from my life.

To prepare I spent most of 2011 doing a seven-day working week as I put more effort into my music, setting myself up with a reliable income stream from it before I handed in my notice from the desk job.  Unsurprisingly I finished off 2011 incredibly ill.  There was an unpleasant bug going round the UK and both Chris and I succumbed to it before Christmas without any hesitation, leaving us both bed-bound for a couple of days and without an ability to eat much of anything for over a week.

After a break over the Christmas period I thought I would share some of the things I have planned for 2012.  This is my statement of intent for the year that this blog is going to be spruced up a bit!

Workout plan for 2012

While I would like to report on my training for the end of 2011 I didn’t actually do anything for the last two weeks, since I was far too sick to leave my bed, let alone get into the gym for the week before Christmas and was then away on a six day walking trip after Christmas.  As expected after such a long break (12 December to 3 January plus 6 days of strenuous walking) I’ve knocked back my numbers quite horribly.  The figures below compare my final December workouts to the figures I got in my workouts last week.

• Back squat: 80kg 3×3, 5×2 down to 75kg 1×3, 7×2
• RDL: 95kg 8×3 down to 90kg 8×3
• Partial overhead press: 20kg 8×3 to 25kg 8×2 (so no loss here, but it was a new exercise in December)
• Hip thrust: 145kg 2×3, 4×2 down to 120kg 8×3 (I’m not so surprised about this – when I put the weight up to 145kg I struggled to get full extension so I stopped my warm up when I hit a weight I felt I was working hard with this time – I expect this to increase reasonably quickly).

Farewell ye great and mighty hip thrust

In 2012 I would like to finally get a handle on my bench press.  I’m going to increase to 3 workouts a week but also cut the size of the workouts slightly.  Part of the reason for this is that I have gained an allotment at the start of 2012 and anticipate doing some pretty hard digging a few times each week – I don’t want to burn out.

In a few weeks time this should be taking the following format:

1. Back squat then superset partial overhead press with chins
2. Superset Bench press with a row and then hip thrusts
3. RDLs and Hip thrusts

Until I get my squat back I’ll be doing workouts 1, 3 then 1 again each week.

I’ve no doubt this will change as I progress through the year and get used to not sitting at a desk all week but I really do want to crack the bench press this year and see if I can get to competition shape by Christmas.

Figure improvements in 2012

I let myself go a bit towards the end of 2011.  I’d made a conscious decision not to strictly diet at any point in 2011 as I was aware of an unhealthy relationship with food that developed through my 3 months of really hard dieting at the end of 2010.  I wanted time to heal that ticking psychological time-bomb.  I was also aware that there would be no free meals out with clients in 2012 and this year would be naturally easier to diet (for starters, no endless supplies of cake on the cabinets at work for birthdays and successful target achievement and competitions and… you get the drift).

No more cake lying about on a daily basis to tempt me

• 15 January to 15 February 2012 – I intend doing a 30 day Paleo Challenge at the start of the year.  It’s pretty much underway now, I didn’t really make a note of exactly when it started since there was much rubbish to cut out of my diet anyway, but there might be something inappropriate on Chris’s birthday this week, so it officially starts on 15 January after the partying finishes.  I know the dates above aren’t really 30 days but as 15 February is my birthday, it seems an appropriate date to stop the challenge.
• January – March 2012 – I will also be getting some of the excess fat off my hips and glutes.  This is one of my experiments for this year though.  I’ve done enough cutting diets in the last few years to know that the only way I could previously get results was an incredibly strict and repetitive food regime, fewer than 950 calories each day, and various cardio strategies over the years.  Despite looking “almost awesome” in December 2010 at the end of my last dieting phase I could never get rid of the handles of fat on the tops of my hips.  They got smaller but never went.  Through monitoring and measuring this year I want to see if the following appear to be true:
  • The fact that stress hinders fat loss is documented in several books on our shelves, hopefully I will find that I finally can shift those lumps of fat that sit at the top of each hip.
  • Reading any bodybuilding article or book by the old school bodybuilders, there is very little “cardio” mentioned.  However, they don’t sit around doing nothing either.  I’m going to see if I can lose weight without a complete starvation diet simply through the fact that I am more mobile each day and therefore using more calories.
  • Being based at home most days should also enable me to try something else too – eating when hungry.  I will always have foods that are appropriate to hand and so I intend eating food when I feel hungry and, where possible, stopping when full.  I will also eat something that appeals and not count the calories of it.  Again, this should hopefully have a positive affect on my figure and it will be interesting to see if I am able to lose weight this way without the psychological issues that come from a regimented calorie-restricted diet.  It will also be interesting to see how much I end up ingesting each day, what foods I tend to favour and what the macronutrient ratio looks like.

The shampoo experiment

I’ve always had trouble with my hair.  It’s thin, limp and hangs in rat-tails unless it’s within half a week since I visited the hairdresser.  It also gets greasy incredibly fast – I’ve never been able to contemplate leaving it unwashed even for one day as I wake up each morning with greasy-looking hair, even if it was washed the evening before.

This first month away from work without clients and internal meetings and a strict “business-acceptable” dress code finally gives me the opportunity I’ve been waiting for to try the shampoo-free experiment.  I can wear headscarves as much as I want and nobody needs to know what my hair looks like.  Everyone’s blog-posts I’ve read about trying this has agreed that it starts to look good after the first month, so I started this experiment on 27 December, when we left for the walking trip.  I’ll be blogging about my progress with photo evidence.

Technical research

Those of you who have been reading my blog for some time will have noticed that the quantity and quality of my technical research posts went sharply downhill towards the end of last year as I had less and less time to read up on topics.

Back to a bit of technical research

This year there are no excuses and areas I want to learn about include:

• Endometriosis – several of my friends have struggled with this and I think it is surprisingly common.  I’d like to understand more about it, both what it is like as someone with endometriosis and also what the known and suspected causes and potential solutions (if any) may be.
• Palaeolithic female figures – this is a much longer term project that could take more than just this year, but I’d like to see what I can learn about the figures of early females through skeletal structure and imagery.  It’s going to be delving back into my degree as an archaeologist.
• Women and bench press – for obvious reasons I’d like to learn more about whether it really is true that women struggle more with the upper body than the lower body when it comes to strength and, if so, why.
• Ketogenic diets – I promised someone at the end of 2010 that I would look into this and I never did.  This year I’m going to learn more about them.
• Metabolic Type diet – again, this has been mentioned to me and I am very skeptical but I shouldn’t be skeptical when I know almost nothing about them, so I’m going to at least read a couple of books and understand it better.

As I learn about these I will write about them on the blog.  However, I’m keen to research areas that other people would also like to learn more about, so please do leave a comment or send me an email through the contact form if you have other topics you would be interested to learn more about from me.

I hope you have all got similarly ambitious plans and intentions for 2012, whether in your personal life, in the gym or at work.  Please do let me know if you miss anything from the articles I used to write or if there is something you’d like me to be writing about but which you aren’t seeing.

Best of luck to you all for a happy and fulfilled year!

Related posts:

1. Why do women start weight training?
2. Setting New Year resolutions
3. Iron Lady: interview with Laura Trimble (part 1)

Take some time to think about yourself

*****

Go back four or five years and I was on the traditional carb-heavy active person’s diet (porridge each morning, pasta salads and bakes for lunch, pasta and rice-laden meals at dinner).  I was living in my trainers, had lots of stress from day to day, plenty of cardio through walking and cycling, no weights, no supplements.  I couldn’t even overhead press an empty dumbbell handle weighing a hefty 1kg.  As for my body weight, I had weighed 50kg for about 10 years, despite being 5’6”, with it never going either up or down.

Sound familiar?

Since then I’ve been through a journey of discovery.

I’ve converted to an almost carb-free existence for a while to learn to be a fat-burner, I went strictly paleo for long enough that I can now get away with the odd non-Paleo diversion from time to time but know that I’m looking after my body the rest of the time.

I care for myself better, both mentally and physically.  I have learned to control my stress levels better and know how to recognise my stress characteristics and manage them.  I can feel different muscles in my body working with an awareness I never had before and, as a result I can use self-massage techniques to keep my body feeling as free and relaxed as possible.

Elsewhere in my life I’ve converted to living in Vibram KSOs whenever I can get away with them.  I still cycle and walk a huge amount but I balance it now with a programme of lifting weights.  I’m push-pressing a 20kg kettlebell for reps, squatting safely over my national qualifying weight (with the BDFPA) and happily hip thrust 140kg for reps.

As for my body composition, I’ve gained an enormous amount of muscle and struggle to keep my weight near 56kg because my love of food, when put alongside the hours I spend sitting still in my desk job mean that it tends to drift up a kilo or two at times, despite the fact that I’m carrying less body fat than I was when I weighed 50kg.  I definitely can’t fit my quads, hamstrings or glutes into any of the jeans I used to wear (which is actually a bit frustrating, but never mind).

*****

It’s a lot of changes in a surprisingly short space of time and that’s just what I’ve achieved without removing the full time desk job from my life.  I expect that a lot of others who read this blog have come through similar journeys of self-discovery and change in the recent past.

Have you adopted some changes to diet, training or lifestyle and seen similar massive changes and benefits to your overall being?

No related posts.

After writing at length about catering for Christmas Eve and (in even more detail) Christmas Day, this is the last article.  It’s going to look at how I handled Boxing Day last year when all the family were staying with me.

Boxing Day – why it’s complicated

Lots of people are often still around and about visiting family and friends on Boxing Day.  The problem is that most of them will have eaten incredibly well the day before and will therefore not really be in the mood for a big feast.  In addition your household chefs have probably had enough of cooking and may well want someone else to take over.

How I handled the day

I cheated in many ways on Boxing Day but my main cheat was the way I handled the lunch.  I had purposefully cooked nearly twice as much as I needed of everything for Christmas Day.  After all, I was just roasting vegetables and stuffing in the oven and doing joints in the slow cookers.  I could very easily put extra quantities in the oven and cook bigger joints of meat.

Breakfast: 

This worked much like Christmas Day.  Chris took charge and cooked up a breakfast that could be put in the middle of the table so that we could help ourselves to the amount we wanted.  We did cook slightly smaller amounts of everything when compared to Christmas Day’s breakfast but otherwise it was exactly the same.  The benefit of this was that I could just buy two quantities of everything in advance of Christmas and didn’t have to get confused with quantities of different foods and where to store them until Boxing Day.

Cheat’s lunch: 

Half an hour before lunchtime I put the leftover onion soup in a pan on the stove to bring it back to a simmer and I filled an oven dish with the leftover roasted vegetables from Christmas Day that I put with the leftover stuffings into the oven to heat through.  I then placed everything that was leftover: cold meat, stuffing, vegetables, prawn cocktail (which I’d made for my niece), soup, cheese, mousse some salad from Christmas Eve onto the table in the kitchen and people came through to help themselves buffet-style.

Interestingly, everyone

Alternative lunch/Dinner:

It was obviously lucky that I was neither catering for so many on Christmas Day that I couldn’t cook extra nor faced with a group of people who hate eating the same thing two days running (and understood they were on leftovers).  For those of you needing to bulk out leftovers or needing to cook for new guests on Boxing Day here are a few suggestions.

• Root vegetable hash – you could actually use any leftover veg and meat for this and then use the eggs to bulk it out.
• Casserole – depending on what you had for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, a basic casserole doesn’t take long to put in the pot and if you are cooking for a whole new group of people this gives you the morning to tidy up from Christmas Day without having to do any cooking beyond the 10 minutes to put casserole ingredients in a pot and a minute of time 45 minutes before the end to add some whole sweet potatoes to have baked on the side.  You might even be able to slip some of the leftover vegetables in there, but I’d put them in 10 minutes before the casserole finishes since they’ll already be well-cooked.  If possible choose a meat you’ve not already eaten in the last couple of days for some variety.
• Curry – if you don’t know what leftovers you’ll have you can easily keep a pack or two of mince in the freezer and defrost it quite quickly if needed.  Mince can then be turned easily into a curry.  Why not be traditional and add your leftovers to the curry?  If you shred leftover meat it can easily be added just before the end of cooking time, reducing the quantity of mince that you need.

*****

That was a few quick and easy ideas on how to feed everyone on Boxing Day while not wasting some good leftovers and also spending minimum time in the kitchen.  I hope they are useful to you.

Have a super Festive Break everyone and I’ll hopefully be back to my usual self with some new and exciting recipes in the New Year.

Related posts:

1. Christmas Eve menu
2. Christmas Day menu
3. Paleo recipes: chicken stock

During the last three Tuesdays before Christmas I’m writing a bit about overall catering for the Christmas period based on my experience of hosting the family last year.

Last week I wrote about some of the basics like storage and covered food on Christmas Eve.  Today I’m going to look at the Christmas Day feasting and I’ll finish off with the Boxing Day conundrum next week.

Christmas Day – requirements and complications

Most people are looking for a traditional feast on Christmas Day.  In addition there are a couple of other things to consider:

• The cook doesn’t want to be stuck in the kitchen all day and miss out on the present-opening festivities or carol singing.
• The younger members of the party (either in age or in mind) might be eager to get their presents open.
• Everyone will have different bedtimes.
• You’ll want to either fit in your own family traditions or create new ones that work for you.
• How on earth to cook enough food with your existing kitchen resources – for us that meant finding space to cook a feast for seven people (and for two days – more on that next week) in a single oven and 2 ring hob.  This was our biggest consideration and most of our meal choices reflect it.

We found that the important bit to make it work was the timing.  We were planning a traditional feast and didn’t want to eat so early that people felt the need to eat another meal before bedtime.  However we also needed to make sure my eldest niece who was 5 years old, had a bit of time to enjoy her presents and let her food go down before she went to bed.  Oh, and I didn’t want to prepare more than one big meal.

How do I cook a massive feast with this much total space and cooking facilities?

In the end, the easiest way to do it was to decide on a time for the main meal and then work backwards from there for other food stops, as necessary.

Christmas Day – how it worked for us

We ended up with the following meals:

• Cooked breakfast – after stocking opening
• Present-opening snacks – this came after a family walk to enjoy the snow and get some fresh air and probably ended up happening just after midday by the time we’d eaten breakfast, got everyone through the bathroom and had a walk.
• Christmas Feast – 3pm.  This time was set in stone, all my cooking preparations were calculated to reach their climax at 2.50pm (allowing ten minutes to get things dished up and on the table) and this time meant all the presents could be opened in a leisurely way before we ate (and Grandpa and a few others had time for a brief snooze in their armchairs).
• Film time snacks – this was a continuation of the feast with some of the food being left out on a table in the kitchen for people to come and go and help themselves.

Suggestions for Christmas Day meals

Breakfast: 

We wanted to something that would, on the whole, get everyone through to the 3pm feast and would be different to normal.

Our cooked breakfast was served up in dishes in the centre of the table so that people could help themselves to as much or as little as they wanted.  Helpfully, Chris also took responsibility for cooking breakfast, leaving me with one less meal to think about each day.

Here’s what we included and how we managed it with our limited cooking resources:

• scrambled eggs (unlike fried eggs, this could be cooked in bulk – it’s impressive how much scrambled egg you can do in one go if you use a wok – I think we did 20 eggs for 6 adults and 1 child but ended up cooking less the next day),
• bacon (fried in batches on a griddle pan),
• sausages (grilled in the oven, with other dishes keeping warm at the bottom of the oven beneath the grill pan),
• mushrooms (halved or quartered and fried up in a small pan),
• grilled tomatoes (cut in half and fried in a frying pan on the remaining hob ring),
• black pudding (fried in slices ones the tomatoes were done).

Present-opening snacks (lunch): 

I felt this needed to be something people could pick at in a casual way if they were hungry without filling up too much.

My recommendation for any type of snack food like this is vegetable batons with dips.  People can pick away at them and they won’t go off if left out for a long time (although they might go a bit soft).

Raw courgette, raw carrot, bell peppers all cut up into batons work well and can be cut up the day before as long as you’ve got an air-tight box you can keep in a cool place.  Dips can be made in advance too although I have to confess that last Christmas I cut my workload and actually bought these ready-made.  However, I chose dips that would have been perfectly possible to make from scratch if I’d wanted to and didn’t have too many unpleasant additives: guacamole, garlic mayonnaise, a hot tomato salsa and sour cream and chive.

Another good addition to this point in the day was my special Paleo chocolate log.  A chocolate roulade cake which I’m now perfecting the recipe for since we all found it a little too rich and heavy last Christmas.  However, this is definitely a time to bring out some cake for those wanting to appease their sweet tooth and soak up an alcoholic drink or two.  Perhaps a carrot and orange cake would go down well.

Carrot and orange cake - a treat for the sweet tooth

My aim with Christmas dinner is to keep it as simple as possible to cook with the maximum preparation done the day before, therefore allowing me maximum family time on Christmas day.  I also had to negotiate the limited cooking space issue and my biggest secret to this was using my slow cooker.  In fact, I borrowed one from Chris’s Mum too so that I could have two slow cookers going at the same time, allowing me to buy cheaper joints of meat, prepare them the night before, keep my oven free for other food and know that the meat would be ready at just the moment I needed it – whatever happened on Christmas Day.

Here are some suggestions of dishes that can meet most of the Christmas cook’s needs.

Starters:

• Soup – it can be made the day before and heated up just before you are ready to eat.  I recommend a vegetable soup of some sort, given the meat feast that will probably follow, such as French onion soup or mushroom soup.
• Antipasti – I’m using the term loosely here for anything that can be laid out cold on the plates just before eating.  Perhaps a little more hassle than heating up soup, but you can always get someone else to lay it out in an attractive way on each plate or, even better, lay everything out on a couple of big plates and people can pass them about, taking what they want.  It’s a great job for any children who want to help.  Anything works as long as you keep the theme.  Either fishy, with smoked salmon, wedges of lemon, a spoonful of salmon mousse and some prawn cocktail (all of which can be prepared a day or two early) or Italian antipasti or Spanish tapas style with cold meats, sundried tomatoes and peppers, artichoke hearts, mozzarella and similar treats.  Another classic is melon but I find this has to be prepared just before you serve up and it can take a while to prepare melon.
• If you really do want to cook everything there and then, I really recommend chilli and lime prawns.  They are delicious.

Paleo chilli and lime prawns

Main course:

My style here is loads of dishes of everything and anything laid out on the table for people to serve themselves.  That includes the meat which we cut into chunks in the kitchen and put all together on a big platter.  The joy of that is that (i) nobody is on show for their carving skills; (ii) you can easily have more than one type of meat on offer; and (iii) if you used cheap joints like brisket and slow-cooked then it doesn’t matter that the joints don’t look pretty – nobody need ever know.  Here are a few suggestions:

• Pot-roasted pork in white wine with garlic, fennel and rosemary (done in a slow-cooker)
• Slow-cooker pot roast beef
  
  

  Pot roasted brisket

• Pork scratchings (can be done a couple of days in advance as long as you’ve got an air-tight box to store them in)
• Chestnut and bacon stuffing (can be made a few days early except for the baking stage so that it just needs putting into the oven at the right time)
• Sausage-meat stuffing (I’ve not put the recipe on the blog – I’ll try to get round to that next year, but the same applies as before that this can be prepared in advance and added to the oven at some point)
• Pigs in blankets (either do them yourself or cheat and buy them ready wrapped from the supermarket, either way they just need throwing into the oven at the right time)
• Roasted vegetables(everything can be prepared several days early and the only thing you have to remember to do is put this in the oven at the right time)
  

  Paleo roasted vegetables

• Spicy red cabbage (another one that can be prepared days in advance and put in the oven at the right time)
• Brussel sprouts with bacon bits (because it wouldn’t be Christmas without – however, this was the only thing I did on the hob-top in the last few minutes before serving)

You may have spotted a theme here.  My aim was to do the meat in the slow cookers and have everything else oven-cooked with minimal attention (maybe coming back once to turn a few things) so that I wasn’t always running to and fro basting things and then, for the last half hour, working out the ideal order in which to steam or boil the vegetables.

Pudding:

Again, I’m going for minimal effort here.  Also, I found that the main course filled everyone up so the puddings were left on the kitchen table and people grazed on them as the evening progressed and had them while watching the film at the end of the day.  Here are some of my favourite suggestions, all of which are rich and treat-like and can be made in advance.

Paleo chocolate mousse

• Chocolate and orange mousse
• Cheesecake
• Sherry trifle made using crispy puffs, coconut milk pouring custard and whipped coconut cream.  Although be warned that the crispy puffs need any crispy skin removed and you just use the centres which don’t mop up liquid so well so use a minimum of sherry and juices.

Top this off with a varied selection cheeseboard and you’ll find that people are grazing for hours.

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That’s it for my Christmas Day suggestions.  How do you cope with Christmas Day?

Related posts:

1. Christmas Eve menu
2. Paleo Christmas entertaining
3. Top 10 posts: Christmas 2009 round up