While the thought of cooking a Christmas dinner for the first time might seem daunting, it need not be all that hard. If you’ve tried your hand at cooking before then cooking for Christmas day shouldn’t pose a real challenge.

One of the reasons people don’t look forward to cooking a Christmas dinner is because of the amount of food that is involved. You have to prepare everything from the turkey (or chicken) to the vegetables, and not to mention the dessert at the end! But with a little bit of planning, cooking the perfect Christmas dinner is actually just a process of following some basic steps.

First things first though, how many people are you cooking for? If it’s a family of 5 then you will need to get a whole turkey to cook in the oven, any less and you can use a turkey ‘crown’ which is just the best cuts of meat. Even if you find that you haven’t got enough turkey. once you’ve added all the vegetables and side dishes to the table people can fill themselves up with that!

Cooking a Christmas dinner requires a lot of planning ahead. Get your turkey early such as mid-late November when the prices are cheaper and there is still a wide range of sizes – often the medium size birds will go first and you don’t want to go to the store a couple of days before Christmas and find they only have an extra large turkey left to feed just 3 people! You can freeze the turkey when you buy it, but it needs to be brought out the freezer on Christmas Eve to let it defrost overnight – don’t try and defrost it by putting it in the microwave!

You can buy your vegetables several days before Christmas day, make sure you store them in a cool dry place though, if you don’t have a suitable location the fridge is the next best option. If you are planning to do a salad dish then wait until the last moment to buy it and put it in the fridge.

Cooking a Christmas dinner is a reverse planning process. What that means is that think of the time you want to serve dinner and plan back from there. If you want to serve at 1pm and the turkey takes 6 hours to cook then you have to make sure you are up by 7am to put it in the oven!

Two hours before the deadline you should start preparing your vegetables and any side dishes. The vegetables need to be cut up and ready to be boiled or steamed – steamed vegetables taste so much better than boiled veggies. You’ll also want to cut up the potatoes ready for roasting. A particular favorite side dish are pigs in blankets which are small pork chipolatas wrapped in bacon. They take about 20 minutes to prepare and 30-40 minutes to actually cook.

All the action tends to happen in the last hour leading up to the dinner being served, the potatoes need to go in to the oven to be roasted (you can place them around the turkey if you are running out of space), the vegetables need to be boiled or steamed and you need to check the turkey is cooking properly. While this is all going on you need to delegate laying the table to someone to ensure there are plates, cutlery and glasses for everyone, any decorations are added such as crackers and candles and let’s not forget some festive music to accompany your dinner!