Christmas dinner for one feels like it ought to be a bigger job than it is. The supermarket certainly thinks so: from November it’s turkey crowns for six, family packs of pigs in blankets and enough sprouts to see off a small village. On your own, the easy answer is a ready meal in a tray. I know, because for years that was my answer to most dinners, Christmas or not.
A proper one for one isn’t hard, though. It’s a turkey steak instead of a bird, one roasting tin, a couple of pans and a bit over an hour. The awkward part is the shopping, because almost nothing on a Christmas plate is sold in a size for one.
Can you make a proper Christmas dinner for one?
Yes, and it’s the full plate: turkey, roast potatoes, carrots and a parsnip, pigs in blankets, buttered sprouts and a gravy made in the turkey pan with a spoonful of cranberry sauce. The Christmas dinner for one takes about 70 minutes from peeling the potato to sitting down, and most of that is the oven doing the work.
The trick is the turkey. Instead of roasting a bird, you fry a turkey breast steak, about 150g, for 3 to 4 minutes a side while everything else finishes in the oven. It’s done in under ten minutes, and you aren’t still eating turkey sandwiches in the middle of January.
How do you get it all hot at the same time?
Work backwards from when you want to eat. The Christmas for one page has the whole dinner as a timeline: pick your eating time and it gives you the clock time for every step, starting 67 minutes before with the oven on and a pan of water boiling. The potatoes go in first, the carrots, parsnip and pigs in blankets join them 20 minutes later, and the sprouts and the turkey are the last quarter of an hour. The gravy is the final four minutes, in the pan the turkey came out of.
If you’ve never done a roast before, Christmas Day on your own is a decent time to start. Nobody’s watching, and nobody will mention it if the parsnip catches.
How much does Christmas dinner for one cost?
About £4.70 a portion at typical UK supermarket prices, counting only what the dinner uses. That’s the price of the plate. It isn’t what you’ll pay at the till.
The sprouts come in a 500g bag and the dinner uses 100g. The streaky bacon comes in a pack of 8 and the pigs in blankets use 2. Shop for Christmas Day alone and most of both is still in the fridge at New Year, looking at you. (I counted this once for every recipe on the site: one dinner for one leaves about two thirds of its fresh packs unused.)
A Christmas week on one shop
So I’d plan the few days around Christmas as one shop, and let the sprouts and bacon decide what’s for dinner. This is the week from the Christmas page:
- Christmas Eve: Honey and mustard glazed gammon (£3.10). Roast parsnips, new potatoes and the first of the sprouts.
- Christmas Day: The dinner (£4.70). More sprouts, and two rashers wrapped round the chipolatas.
- Boxing Day: Bubble and squeak with crispy bacon (£1.60). Shredded sprouts and potato fried into a cake, with a fried egg on top.
- 27 December: Sprout, bacon and chestnut spaghetti (£2). More sprouts, more bacon, on the table in about 20 minutes.
- 28 December: Turkey curry (£3.20). A day off from sprouts. It works with a cooked chicken breast if there’s no turkey left, which, with a turkey steak, there won’t be.
Between them they use 420g of the 500g bag of sprouts and 6 of the 8 rashers. What’s left is a handful of sprouts and two rashers. The rashers freeze flat between baking paper and cook from frozen. The sprouts can go into whatever you have on the 29th, or be blanched for 2 minutes, cooled and frozen.
The button at the bottom puts all five into the planner, with Christmas dinner on the 25th and one shopping list for the lot. The planner holds this week and next, so it works from 14 December. The planner and the shopping list are free. Pro, if you want it, picks ordinary weeks like this one for you: dinners that share their packs.
What if you don’t want turkey?
Then don’t have it. Nobody’s checking. The Christmas dinners for one include a mushroom, chestnut and cranberry Wellington for vegetarians, which takes about an hour and needs only the oven and one pan, and a duck breast with orange and port sauce that takes about 40 minutes and looks a lot more effort than it is.
How long do Christmas leftovers keep?
Two days. The Food Standards Agency says leftovers should be eaten or frozen within 2 days (1 day for rice dishes), and cooled, covered and put in the fridge or freezer within one to two hours. So whatever you cook too much of, Boxing Day and the 27th are its days, then it’s the freezer.
If you spend the day at someone else’s and come home with a foil parcel of turkey, the Christmas leftovers for one are for exactly that: a toastie with brie and cranberry, a turkey and ham pie for one, and the curry.
Whatever you cook, cook something. It’s still Christmas when it’s just you, and a proper dinner on a warm plate beats the tray from the microwave by a distance.
Neil