An AGA is fabulous to cook everything for Christmas. You can put sweet and savoury items in the ovens together and the smells and flavours won’t cross over, your kitchen will always be cosy and your dogs and cats will love the warmth.
Turn up your AGA on Christmas Eve. Your AGA may struggle to keep it’s heat with all that cooking going on and there is nothing more annoying than trying to make roast potatoes when you’ve lost a lot of heat from your roasting oven. Remember to turn it back down again when you’ve finished.
Roast potatoes – Make your life easy and parboil them on Christmas Eve. Parboil them for around 10-15 minutes, you want them starting to flake at the edges so they crisp up nicely in the oven. Drain the potatoes and pop them back into the pan, leave them for 5 minutes for the steam to escape, heat up the goose fat (makes the most wonderful roasties) then carefully tip in the potatoes, pop into the roasting oven until almost cooked then cool and chill . On Christmas Day all you have to do is take them out of the fridge an hour before cooking to bring them to room temperature and roast them for the last 20 minutes to crisp them up.
Turkey, cook breast down in the roasting oven but time it so it’s cooked an hour before you want to eat, either move it into the simmering or warming oven or if you don’t have room just put it on the counter, cover with two or three layers of tinfoil to keep warm and let it ‘rest’ for an hour while you finish off cooking the veg and trimmings.
Christmas Pudding – steam this in the simmering oven once you’ve cooked your root veg in there, just set the timer to remind you as it’s very annoying to discover your pudding still in your simmering oven a few days later, tends to be cremated and inedible.
Potatoes and root veg – bring these to the boil on your boiling plate, pour off most of the water, leaving around 3cm in the bottom of the pan, put a lid on and put onto the oven floor in the simmering oven for the same amount of time you’d simmer them for, lovely fluffy potatoes.
Green veg – cook on the simmering plate, don’t try and put these into the simmering oven as you’ll over cook them.
White sauce or brandy sauce – make ahead, refrigerate, reheat on the boling plate and keep warm in the simmering oven or warming oven.
AGA popcorn – place a disc of bake-o-glide onto the simmering plate, sprinkle over a layer of popcorn, replace the lid and wait for the popping to stop – very cool for parties
Drop scones – a tea time staple in our house, cook them on a piece of bake-o-glide on the simmering plate.
Ironing – fold t-shirts, tops, tea towels, PJs and place on the lid of the simmering oven , turning once for beautifully ironed clothes, cheaper than paying your teenager to do them.