Christmas dinner planning with Waitrose

Many people stress at Christmas time over the all important Christmas dinner, especially if they have more people over than they would normally cater for.

Now I must admit to never having cooked a Christmas dinner, and if I let you in on a secret I rarely cook a roast as often find them too much work-even if it is one of my favourite dinners! However when I do cook a roast I often get the quantities completely wrong and often go way over board with the spuds and not enough of the veg!

This is why Waitrose have come up with a handy tool for Christmas-The Christmas Dinner Calculator.

The Calculator suggests quantities of the popular and traditional Christmas dinner ingredients depending on how many guests you select on the bar at the top. You can choose between a couple and a group of 25 guests.

Now part of our review was to cook an early Christmas meal based on the quantities shown on the calculator chart, although there are 4 of us, I know that Sam doesn't eat much and the boy's aren't the biggest veggie eaters so I did a calculation for a family of 2 and for 3 to suit their likes (knowing that the calculations are based on adults and Sam's portions being teeny) excluding the pigs in blankets which I calculated for a group of 4!

With this is mind our calculations are:

Turkey: 1.5kg (our turkey ended up being 1.8kg as couldn't find a smaller one)

Bread sauce: 150g

Brussels Sprouts: 200g

Roast potatoes: 495g

Red cabbage: 200g

Roasting Veg: 300g

Gravy: 300g

Cranberry sauce: 60g

Stuffing: 225g

Pigs in blankets: 12

All the right weight of food (except for the slight extra on the sausage and stuffing)!

Now when I was preparing this I really thought that there weren't enough potatoes or vegetables, however once cooked I was proven wrong there was plenty between us. I don't think all of us had our biggest appetites this evening but I think on the whole the chart was pretty much spot on, we did have a small amount of red cabbage and sprouts left, and had a lot of turkey left (but bare in mind it was 300g more than the chart said).

Forgot to take a photo with gravy on too due to hungry kids!

 Personally though if I had guests around for dinner I would much rather have a little left than not enough, and who doesn't enjoy a turkey sandwich later in the day? We did admittedly have extra cooked of the pigs in blankets and the gorgeous stuffing which has been nibbled on since the dinner!

This is a very handy tool, I think especially more so for when you have a larger group to cook for than normal as it is very hard to guestimate the quantities for so many mouths! The only thing I did think was a bit odd were the weights for the gravy and bread sauce as this isn't something I would personally measure in grams and would opt for measuring in a jug instead. 

Going forward for next year I think it would be very handy for Waitrose to have a Christmas dinner timings linked to the calculator's quantities and perhaps a few simple recipes that you could click on directly from the 'cabbage image' for an example rather than going to other pages on the site.

If you are planning a party over Christmas there is also a handy Festive Party Calculator too.

This is nothing to do with the post, but we also let the boy's choose items for pudding from Waitrose and they were delicious! 

The icing on the reindeer is to die for! Mmm...

This is a sponsored post but all views and opinions are my own. We received a £60 Waitrose voucher to buy our food and also a few lovely Christmas decorations which will look great in our new home.