This is one of the biggest meals of the year, guys. Whether it's Thanksgiving or Christmas time, you need a fail-safe recipe that guarantees perfect results and tastes every single time. Really good, honest, gorgeousness.
So, one of the first things you need to do to guarantee the most amazing, succulent roasted turkey is actually get the turkey out of the fridge at least 2, 2 and 1/2 hours before you want to cook it. I always recommend buying a high-welfare, free-range turkey, which is the one that I'm using here. It's not just more ethical, the flavor is incredible.
Before we start prepping the bird for roasting, we've got to think ahead a little bit, and we want a trivet that's going to make the best gravy ever. We've got three or four little, medium-size onions. These are going to roast under the bird, go gorgeously sweet. Some celery, some carrots. You want them quite crude and quite big. Put a little rosemary in there, put a few bay leaves in there. And also, this is the opportunity to put in your giblets.
Turkey neck is like oxtail. The depth of flavor and the collagen and the gorgeousness and the... it's unbelievable, right? So, we're just going to shape that in. That's our trivet done. If you want to know how to make the most amazing gravy, click the link. I'm going to give you a recipe for basic preparation of a gorgeous bird, okay?
You want about half a pack of butter. Most of this will drain off along with the actual natural turkey fat. So, just rub it on.
There's no sort of polite way to prepare your turkey. So, let me just wash my hands. Then we're going to season generously with lovely sea salt, some nicely ground black pepper. We've got some nutmeg. It just feels like that little edge of Christmas. Half a nutmeg is all you need.
Okay, so now let's talk about stuffing. A lot of people ram a load of stuffing in this cavity here. And what that does, it's not a pretty sight, I admit, but what it does is it stops the natural air flow going into the bird, and it kind of messes with your cooking times, okay? We want to stuff it from the neck, actually. With about 600 g to a kilo, depending on the size of your turkey. And then just tuck the skin back under, like that. And look, you would have never have known I'd been there, okay? If you want to see how to make the stuffing for this, click the link.
Place your turkey onto the trivet. I did say you don't want to fill it up, but just a little clementine, just a little Christmas clementine, put one or two up there. And of course, you can grab some rosemary or thyme, um, and get that up there as well. Just give it a little rub, get a little bit of butter on there. Shove it in there. It hasn't stopped the air going in, but it will create the opportunity for fragrance and potential and gorgeousness.
A thing that I would recommend, uh, is a thermometer. Now, we're going to push this thermometer into the fattest part of the turkey, and just leave it there. It'll give you an honest reading about what's happening on the inside of the bird. We want you to be on top of that. Get a little foil. This is going to really help retain juiciness, uh, and also protect the skin. And I just expose the thermometer like this. Super, super helpful.
My medium-sized turkey here is 7 kilos on the head, calculating the cooking times at 35 minutes per kilo. You work out your times, guys, and get that bird in the oven at 180° C, which is 350° F.
Find out more in the description box below. Don't be afraid to go in halfway through the cooking, remove the foil, and get a little spoon of fat and just baste the turkey with all those gorgeous cooking juices. Pop the foil back on, and about half an hour before the end of its cooking time, remove the foil for the skin to crispen up.
So, here you go, guys, a beautiful, beautiful turkey. This bird has been out for about half an hour. It's cool enough to pick up. Right, we're going to just pour any juices out, put it onto a warm platter, and you can just put a bit of tin foil over this and a tea towel. 2 hours resting is going to be gorgeous.
It's not optional, it's not a luxury, it's essential. So, there you go, guys. That is my perfect roast turkey. No tears, guys.
Let's get this right. This weekend, I'd love you to have a go at this. This is the ultimate meatloaf, right? This is something that I really love. Comfort food at its best. It's big, feasting, family food.
This meatloaf is always a winner with my lot. Classically comforting and then ramped up a notch with pork and beef for flavor and juiciness, oozy mozzarella, and a jacket of smoked bacon. All served with aromatic fennel, lashings of gravy, and a volcano of mashed potato.
Okay, first job. It's super simple. Let's get the veg cooking. Throw a swig of olive oil into a large pan. Tear up some fresh sage and rosemary. Then add two chopped onions and two carrots to make a rich veggie base. It's a little bit of seasoning.
And we'll slowly fry that on a medium-low heat for about 20 minutes, 25 minutes. Let it caramelize. Let the flavors sweeten and really intensify. Then we'll let it cool down and then that will go in the meatloaf and it will make all the difference.
Next up, fennel. The surprising star ingredient to make this meatloaf sing. I'm using four medium bulbs sliced into wedges. They're crunchy and they're aniseedy. But as you slow cook them or roast them, they just become sweet and savory and have depth of flavor. Absolutely beautiful.
Lay the bulbs in the bottom of a roasting pan. Add a few chopped fennel tops for extra flavor and season and drizzle with olive oil.
Give it all a good toss and then roast in the oven for 30 minutes at 180°C, which is 350°F.
Okay. So, the fennel has been roasting and look, it's half cooked. That's looking very nice. This has cooled down, right? And it's lovely and sweet and gorgeous. So, let's make the meatloaf, okay? And meatloaf can be made out of any blend of minced meat, but let's get really into it. This is what makes it good or great to incredible.
For the best flavor, I'm using a kilo of pork shoulder and 1 kilo of beef brisket, but you can go for any good quality mince you like. Add your cooled down veg and 200 g of breadcrumbs to absorb the juices and give the meatloaf lightness. And then we're going to go in with two... hi, guys. You all right? So, do you want to do some cooking? Yes. Next, my two little helpers will crack in two eggs. Eggs go in the middle.
Add a generous sprinkling of salt and pepper, 2 tsp of whole grain mustard, and then to take this meatloaf to the next level, tear in a ball of creamy mozzarella. We've got the seasoning and the veg and the breadcrumbs soak up all the fat and it's juicy, delicious, but then you get these little bombs of mozzarella that are gooey and sort of just gorgeous.
With all the elements added, it's all hands on deck for the mixing. So, try and keep it in the bowl. The points for keeping it in the bowl. I know this is a problem for you. Keep it in the bowl.
Make sure that all the ingredients are evenly distributed so that every bite will be layered with flavor. Once mixed, form it into a loaf shape and lay it in your dish of half roasted fennel.
Now, we're going to roast it, but we want to do more. We want to add more flavor. So, grab the bacon, please, buddy. Crisscross the rashers of smoked bacon, leaving gaps so the rich fat can kiss the meat and the top can go crispy and golden. Then, to keep it nice juicy, wet some greaseproof paper, cover, and tuck it into bed. Night night.
Pop the meatloaf into the oven at 180°C or 350°F and roast it initially for 30 minutes.
Okay, so it's had half an hour and it's basically cooked now but without character. I want to create an incredible sauce and there's a really simple way to do that.
Take 500 mils of beef, chicken, or veg stock, add a tablespoon of sun-dried tomato paste, then two tablespoons of blackcurrant jam, and give it a good stir. So, all we do now is pour that over and like any gravy, all the sticky bits off the bottom of the tray will start to blend really nice. Look at that.
Finish by scattering some sage and rosemary rubbed in a little olive oil over the meatloaf. Then pop it back into the oven for another 45 minutes to let all those gorgeous flavors come together.
So, the meatloaf is done and this is what you get, ladies and gents. Yum. Look at that. Lovely gravy. Gorgeous golden meatloaf.
Serve with fresh, lightly blanched greens and then a proper 80s favorite. A volcano of creamy mashed potato erupting with melted butter. Cabbage, volcano potatoes, lovely meatloaf. You ready to try some? Yeah.
You know, the point is we don't want a dry meatloaf. So, if we look in here, it's juicy. So, there you have it, guys. A classic weekend comforting meatloaf, deeply flavored with smoked bacon and mozzarella on a bed of aromatic fennel, swimming in gorgeous gravy. The ultimate centerpiece for a family feast.
Absolutely comforting. Delicious deep flavor. Really nice. So juicy and tasty. The sweetness from the jam in the sauce is off the chart good. And then the fennel. Mhm. Guys in the cafe, I'm going to look after you. You're going to love me.
This is a French squash. You've got an acorn squash there, cricket ball squash, butternut squash here. You can get these in all the supermarkets, I think good delis or farmers markets. I'm going to use this one and I want to take essentially the lid off of this part of the squash. It's very simple. I just put the knife in here, right? I stick it in. Hands are away, it's all safe, right? And we just rock it sort of around like that and you can get someone to help you, you know, if you're not entirely sure, but you just rotate it until it joins up again.
And then that exposes this, a natural bowl that I'm going to cook in a way where you eat the whole thing, but also it can hold things. And I'm going to fill this up with lovely sweet leek white cheesy sauce. Okay, so let's take the seeds out. Go around the bowl like this and just disconnect all those amazing seeds.
And if you want to, you can wash these and roast them with a little spice. You can save them, put them in a little envelope and try and grow them the next year. Don't worry about the stringy bits because they are full of flavor. This first bit of preparation is so so simple.
A little drizzle of oil around the rim and also on the inside. We're going to go in with some salt and some pepper. And there's one other little spice that I want to use as well, which is a nutmeg. Now, this is a mighty spice of Christmas time. About half of one, grated. Smells amazing.
Put that into a little dish where it snugly fits. So, in the oven we go. 1 and 1/2 hours, 180° C, 350° F.
Okay, three nice large leeks. Just take the outer layer off, which tends to be a little bit more fibrous. Just split the leek down the length like that. And then, when I wash it under the tap, wash it away from the stalk. Just open up the leek and just wash any grit away. And actually, this little bit of water here is not a bad thing because I'm going to start frying it and it's going to steam nicely before it fries. So, right. Leeks washed.
Finely slice that about a quarter of a centimeter. And then, as it gets the kind of the whiter part here, then about a centimeter thick will go because they're more tender. I'm going to use garlic as well, two cloves. Don't need much. Just a little slice there.
I'm going to cook this in a large pan. Whack that onto a nice high heat with some butter and olive oil. This is going to serve like 10-12 people, right? So, our job here is to make these leeks like the best leeks ever.
So, when that butter starts to bubble, in we go with the garlic. I'm going to use thyme, but you can pick any herb that you love. But, just a little thyme really makes all the difference. Take the darker green part of the leeks first and that can benefit from a little bit more direct cooking.
The smell is amazing. In with some salt and pepper. Get that seasoning happening. Go in with the whiter part of the leeks. Put the lid on. Turn it down to a medium heat. I'm going to cook this for about a half an hour. And that environment of frying and steaming is going to tenderize those leeks like you wouldn't believe. I'll give it a stir every now and again and these will be soft, tender, and gorgeous.
So, this smells amazing. It's had just under half an hour. It's shrunk right down. And I've added a little splash of water here and there as well. And that just ensures that it's really tender and soft. And a little bit of seasoning.
I'm now going to turn it into a white sauce. One heaped tablespoon of plain flour. You can use the gluten-free flour, no trouble at all. And that of course will start to thicken with the butter and the oil that we put in. And then we'll add about 500 mils of milk. Just gently stir that in. It will thicken. It will go shiny. And it will give you that kind of really comforting unctuous kind of silkiness that you get from a béchamel sauce, but obviously with leek in it.
This time of year, we're all kind of getting our hands around a fair old bit of cheese. So, um, you can use whatever you want. I'm using cheddar because it's nice and oozy. If you want to mix it up with other chosen cheeses that you love, of course, who doesn't love a little bit of red Leicester.
I'm just going to put a little bit of Gruyère in there, which is fairly mild. It's not too funky, but it's going to really melt in the most beautiful way. Take it over to our white sauce. And I'll turn the heat off now. I don't want to boil cheese, but that residual heat of the sauce is just going to melt it into the most amazing sweet leek cheesy fondue-y white sauce.
And this, over your typical cauliflower cheese, is like game changer, next level. Even a spoonful over a little fillet of fish baked in the oven, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy.
I want to show you how it all comes together. I've got some breadcrumbs here, about 100 g, and some walnuts. Just scrunch the walnuts into the bread, and then a little olive oil, like that, and some salt, and this will be an incredible little crunchy topping for this dish.
I've got the pumpkin here. It's had an hour and a half. Look at that. Ah, it smells amazing. It smells really festive. Super, super cool. You can see it's shrunk a little bit. That shrinkage means concentration of flavors. And what it gifts you with, which is really unusual, is this little broth. It is utterly festive. Take some of that amazing pumpkin broth.
And this method of cooking pumpkin like this, I just love. And if I'm doing a curry, I will do this and just spice it slightly differently. And this juice you can put into your rice. If you were doing like a North African dish, a tagine or something like that, cook that as well. You know, this is a really cool, really cool technique.
So, fill this up with the beautiful white sauce. You can kind of just go over the rim of the pumpkin. So, be generous. Just look at that. And then on top of this, I'm going to go on with those beautiful breadcrumbs and nuts. Just do a pile like that.
And the great thing about this recipe is you can do it the day before, right? So, Christmas Eve or even the day before that if you want, right? You can put it all together, let it cool down, cover it, put it somewhere cold, and then on the big day, when the turkey comes out, you can get that in the oven, and you just blast that until it's flipping and gorgeous. Look at that. Come on. Imagine that on Christmas Day, right? Let's get it in the oven. Let's finish it.
So, in the oven now for 20 minutes until golden, flipping, and delicious.
Look at that. Come on. Get a little platter or a cake stand, and just move it over. Come on. That's something different, right? Let's just serve up a little portion just to show you. Beautiful, silky, creamy leek sauce with a chunk of that lovely squash.
That oozy cheesy sweet leek sauce and those crunchy bits. Mhm. So good. Oh my lord. Imagine that in the middle of the table on any Sunday roast, Christmas time, special occasion. It is a beautiful, spectacular thing. And whether you scoop it or slice it, do whatever you want. It's utterly delicious.
We're going to make the most delicious pumpkin pie. I cannot wait to share this recipe with you. It's the perfect time of year, autumn, winter, Christmas time, of course Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pie made famous by America, Canada. They love it, and actually I love it, too.
So, this is what you call a delicata pumpkin, but you can also use squashes. Butternut squash is a really easy one to get in supermarkets. Normally, in America and Canada, they often would buy this, pureed pumpkin in a tin. This is convenient, but the flavor from this is much, much better.
So, how do we cook this? It's really easy. Turn the oven on to 180° C, 350° F. Take yourself a little fork, give it a little prick, just a couple of times, and literally chuck the pumpkin in there, close the door, and let it cook for an hour and a half to 2 hours. Inside, it will go like nice and soft and gorgeous. The outside will be kind of burnt, it doesn't matter.
So, if you have a look at these, these are completely cooked now and cooling down. So, I want to give you a really simple recipe and method for a classic sweet shortcrust pastry. The classic bit is half fat to flour, okay? So, we have 150 g of fat, butter, nice butter. We've got 300 g of plain flour. We're going to give it a little pinch of salt. I'm going to sweeten it just lightly with 50 g of icing sugar.
Now, I want to accent it with just a little bit of orange. Orange and pumpkin, really good friends. So, I'm going to take a little fine grater like this and just give it a little rub. And it smells amazing already. So, we've got that there.
Use your fingers, and then all we're going to do is just rub the flour and the butter together. And it just takes like a minute and a half. So, now we're going to make a little well in the middle, and I'm going to steal one egg here. Nice little free-range egg, crack that in there, no shell, and I'll just take a little fork, and I'll just whisk this up.
And once you've done that, we're just going to stir it in to the pastry like that. I don't want to be kneading it like bread, cuz that's just going to make it firm and hard. We don't want that. So, look, you can see it's just coming together. It's just beautiful.
Now, you could wrap it up, and you can put that in the fridge and let it relax. Absolutely fantastic. Um, I'm actually not going to do that today, cuz I'm going to cheat and I'm going to get on with it just to show you that you can. You would normally, once you've let it rest, sort of roll it out with a rolling pin, bit of flour, you can do all that.
I want to show you that it can even be simpler, right? I'm going to just take a little bit of this pastry, slice it, and then press it into this mold, like this, right? Probably slice it about just under a centimeter thick, and this is very simple. I'm just using my fingers to press out and join these little slices, and push it up the edge.
And it might not be perfect, but I like all the little notches, all the little imperfections. I like the fact that we're not trimming off the edges, okay? So, that's that, right? Super easy. I can smell the orange. It's going to be amazing.
So, that bit is done. I want to use this pumpkin, and I want to puree it and get it really, really smooth. If I just cut this in half, you can see that it's soft. And if we get in there, look at the color. I mean, it's extraordinary.
Just take a little bowl and get the seeds out. These seeds, by the way, you can just kind of wash them off, toss them in a bit of oil, salt and pepper, and roast them. But, what we want is the flesh. We don't want the skin, and we don't want the seeds. So, we'll remove those.
Right, let's get on with this. So, what I'm going to do is get my food processor, and we want 400 g of beautiful cooked pumpkin in there. Then I'm going to add 175 g of golden caster sugar in, and 100 ml of double cream goes in as well. So, we've now taken pumpkin that is traditionally sort of savory, and it's now in the world of sweet.
And we can go further with that delicious sweetness with a little help from some friends here. First up, let's start with vanilla. So, I want to go three teaspoons of vanilla paste. I'm then going to use 3/4 of a level teaspoon of cinnamon. Don't go mad, right? Cinnamon's quite powerful. Then I'm going to go for half a teaspoon of ground ginger. This is allspice. I'm just going to go for a quarter of an allspice. And then another great one, nutmeg. Just take that fine grater again and just do 20 little gratings. This is really going to make this delicious.
Now, three eggs. So, we're going to split the eggs two ways. So, we are going to just crack the egg and put the egg whites into a nice large bowl that we can whisk these eggs and then keep these lovely yolks here. Okay. So, this is going to go into my machine. Look at that color.
Okay, while that's doing its magic, a nice little pinch of salt and just whisk it up until it's nice and stiff. And you know when it's stiff when you can hold it over your head and nothing happens. Woohoo! Okay, we're good to go.
We have our lovely cake mix and we'll pour that into here. Look at the color. Now, we want to fold in the egg whites. So, from the outside to the inside, so really go around the rim and just get all of those bits of egg whites. And even though it's not cooked, I can smell all the spices. Look at that.
Okay, so in this recipe, we are not going to bake this pastry case blind, right? We're going to have it raw, we're going to have it raw, and we're going to cook it in the oven. So, get your oven preheated to 180° C, which is 350° F. Look at that. Heavenly.
Very importantly, we're going to put this beautiful pie... Look at that. Right, that's going to go right on the bottom of the oven, right? I know that's a wood oven, ignore that. In your oven, put it on the bottom, not on a shelf, on the bottom. That way you're going to get max temperature under that pastry.
We're going to cook it for around 45 minutes and that's going to be utterly delicious. What's going to happen is this will soufflé up a little bit and it will look amazing. As it cools down, it will just sag and it might even crack and it's all going to be gorgeous.
And then I'm going to show you how to serve it with the most delicious pecan nuts that we're going to caramelize in maple syrup. Right, let's cook this.
So, it smells amazing. Okay, so this has had, I'd say, just under 50 minutes. Look at that. Such a lovely rustic pumpkin pie. Look at the color. Really, really autumnal. Smells amazing.
Okay, so now what we want to do is let that cool down so you can slice it beautifully. I like to do that onto a little cake rack like this. Look at that. Right, so let that cool down.
And now I want to show you how to make the most incredible praline of pecan nuts with maple syrup. I'm going to get a pan on. So, maple syrup, you know, I'm always thinking about Canada, North America. I'm thinking about, you know, all those gorgeous flavors, pumpkin. Um, pecan is a really nice nut to play with. Have a little look at this. Of course, you can do other nuts, but it just feels a little bit more right to use pecan nuts. Delicious.
So, four or five tablespoons of lovely maple syrup goes in. We're going to bring that to a boil. And then as it boils, it is going to start to caramelize a bit more and thicken a little bit more. Now, when you do that, it goes a little bit darker. You're concentrating the flavor more, but also this is currently a syrup, but when we're kind of evaporating sort of moisture from this, you're going to make basically like a little caramel that's hard, crunchy.
So, I'm going to put a couple of handfuls of the pecans into here and cook that into them like this. And just for like a minute or two, we're going to reduce this down so it's a nice caramel. Get a tray. Get some greaseproof paper. Just have a little look. You see how dark that's got?
So, when you're doing anything around the world of caramel, do not have kids running around, right? It is hotter than boiling water. Okay? So, we'll use a metal spoon, not a plastic one. And while it's hot, we'll move it around like this. And it will cool down pretty quickly. And as it cools, because you've reduced the syrup, it will cool like hard. So, look. Let that cool down.
I've got a nice little kind of, I think, a nice vibe to have with this pie. I'm going to take that orange that we used the zest for the pastry. And I've got here some cranberry sauce. So, what I'll do is just squeeze in the juice of half of that orange and just let it down, right? And I think this is really nice to have on the side with the cream and almost ripple it through. It's going to be a good thing.
So, that's going to cool down. I'm going to wash this up. And then we're going to serve up. While that's chilling, how about giving us a little bit of love? Click the like button and even subscribe. Oh, and remember to turn on that notification bell, so you know what's happening. Now, back to the recipe. So, this has cooled down nicely.
Uh, a little tip. So, if you get a bowl that's nice and sturdy, then in theory, if I put that on there like that, that falls off like that. Very dramatic. Uh, so, we can take that off. And remove this. And then, what I can do is pop this on the board and get my knife just underneath that little bit of the mold like that. Carefully run your knife around the base and carefully just move it out, so it's all lovely and protected.
Look how lovely that tart looks. It's a really nice rustic tart. I love it. I love its imperfections. I love the little ridges. I love the little cracks. It feels really, really hearty. Smells amazing.
So, um, one thing to go with this, and I've got some double cream here that I've taken the liberty to just whip. I'll put some in there like that and then a little bit of that orange and cranberry sauce. So, I'm just going to fold that through. It's going to be good.
So, now it comes on to our little brittle here. So, this is nice and cool and you can see that it's turned into kind of like a giant thing. So, it's still a little bit warm. When that gets cold, that will snap. So, you can just break this off and then what you can do over here is just chop it up. That's sensational.
So, we've got pecan chunks, we've got pecan brittle, we've got our lovely cranberry and cream ripple, and then here we've got that amazing pumpkin pie. Straight into the middle. All the way down. Let's do a nice little slice. Oh, it's pretty good. So, there you go. Beautiful.
And then we can take a few of these beautiful bits of caramelized pecan here and look, we've got the brittle here. And that can just go to the side. Look at that. Oh. And then we've got our little ripple of cream and cranberry. Right, here we go. Little quiet moment in my favorite place. Mhm.
Crumbly pastry. Soft, velvety, fluffy pumpkin pie filling. Just so many textures. So good. So, guys, what are you waiting for? Homemade pumpkin pie, spiced up. Go on. Have a go.
