Merry Christmas

Luckily, we have her recipes. Now, we have someone with her baking talent.

 

One of my goals over the past couple of years, even though I'm an amateur cook, has been to replicate my mum's Christmas dinner. She's English, so we had turkey, roast potatoes (never mashed), stuffing, corn, broccoli, sprouts, peas, and gravy. She's still alive and given me help, but it's still taken me three years to get her turkey correct (an orange and an onion up its ass, bacon draped over it), and this year I finally mastered the roast potatoes (parboiled, then drained and shaken in the pot to get rough-edged, then roasted in duck fat at scorching temperatures until crispy). Everything else but the gravy is getting pretty close.

But the gravy... Goddammit. My mum's gravy is fucking witchcraft-level alchemy. I made it with her yesterday for the third time, and it's some weird amalgam of fat from the turkey and bacon, plus starchy water from the boiled potatoes, plus chicken OXO cubes and Bisto brown gravy powder, stirred constantly, with a dash of cold water here, and a little bit of eye of fucking newt or something else here, and I have come to the sad conclusion that after she's gone—many years from now, please and thank you, Universe—I will spend the rest of my life trying and failing to get it right.

 

Maybe take some video snippets of the process? That might help.

 

My mother-in-law was English and it was always beef on Christmas. The rest, yeah! Roasted potatoes, yeah! Gravy, yeah! All those veges, meh.

 

The look on this FA's face says, "um, OK dad..."

Shout out to this dad who flew with his daughter while she worked Christmas

 

This is a good idea and a video will be nice to have for other reasons. Thank you.