Planning Christmas dinner without the panic

Christmas dinner isn't hard because any one dish is difficult. It's hard because everything has to be ready at once, in one oven. The answer is a plan, worked backwards from the time you want to eat.

The week before

• Choose your recipes and save them in one place. Check every recipe's oven temperature: if two need the oven at the same time but at different temperatures, change one now, not on the day.
• Order the bird. Allow roughly 500 g of turkey per person on the bone, more if you want leftovers.
• Write the shopping list, and buy anything that keeps.

Two days before

• Defrost a frozen turkey in the fridge. It takes about a day for every 2 kg, so a big bird needs to start earlier than you'd think.
• Make anything that keeps: cranberry sauce, gravy base, stuffing (stored separately, not in the bird).
• If you're brining, start the night before. Brine recipes are one place where your salt type really matters: check the conversion before you start.

Christmas Eve

This is the day of mise en place. Peel the potatoes and keep them in cold water, prepare the sprouts and carrots, set the table. Everything you do today is something you won't be doing with the oven open tomorrow.

The day itself, working back from dinner

Say you want to eat at 3pm, with a 5 kg turkey:

Cooking times vary a lot with the size of the bird and your oven, so treat these as a shape, not a schedule. The turkey is done when the thickest part of the thigh reaches 74°C (165°F).

Run several timers at once

On the day, the hard part is keeping track of five things at once. Name a timer for each, and you'll know which one is going off:

One last thing

Delegate. Someone else can carve, someone else can make the gravy, and someone else can definitely do the washing up.