How To Create The Perfect Christmas Dinner In Student Accommodation

For many students, student accommodation Christmas dinner is a ritual and one of the highlights of the year. It makes sense to pay homage to your newly adopted family and celebrate Christmas together with a big bird and bottle of mulled wine, before you head home and spend time with your biological family.

Your hall’s Christmas dinner is the perfect excuse to get a little merry, eat lots of good food and reminisce on all the antics you’ve got up to this year. So we’ve put together a guide to ensure your student accommodation Christmas dinner runs as smoothly as possible.

The meat

First you need to work out how much meat you will need. Work out the numbers and then come to a decision on what meat you’d like to consume with your dinner. Turkey is traditional, but chicken will also suffice. Head down to your local butcher, that way you know you are getting good quality meat. Either individual chicken breasts or a small chicken can be purchased from a local butcher, too. By going to a butcher you can also ask them about cooking times if you’re not sure.

If you want to do it properly and go for the ultimate Christmas turkey dinner, this step-to-step recipe for Mom’s Roast Turkey from Simply Recipes will help.

The vegetables

Head down to your local market to get your vegetables. These vegetables tend to be a lot more fresh and generally taste better. When the mulled wine is flowing and you’re panicking trying to cook your first ever turkey, a one roasting dish recipe makes life a lot easier. It combines all the usual Christmas dinner suspects; carrots, parsnips, red onion etc. but involves little preparation.

Simply peel and chop your vegetables, then throw them all in a pan together. Pour over about 5 tbsp of vegetable oil, season and evenly spread thyme throughout the tray. Roast in an oven at 190 degrees for 1hr 15 mins and toss at regular intervals.

The roasties

Making delicious roast potatoes is simple and cheap, all you need is a bag of potatoes or two, and a packet of butter. Chop the potatoes to the size you want them, boil the chopped potatoes until they’re just starting to get soft, then add in some chopped up butter (the more the merrier). Next, pop them in the oven at 180° until they are golden brown. Simple and delicious.

The extras; gravy, Yorkshire pud, stuffing – and those pigs in blankets

To keep things simple, you could head down the local supermarket and pick these up pre-made on the cheap. If you decide to get gravy from the supermarket, add the juices from the turkey or chicken and vegetables to to make it tastier.

Again, if you want to do it properly, and give your mum or dad’s Christmas dinner a run for its money, use these recipes:

The Gravy: BBC Good Food: Easy Turkey Gravy 

Yorkshire Pudding: All Recipes: Classic Yorkshire Pudding 

Stuffing: BBC Food Recipes: Sage and Onion Stuffing 

Pigs in Blankets: Nigella Lawson: Pigs in Blankets (via FoodNetwork)

Things to remember: 

• Don’t forget to organise the Secret Santa. Set an amount that everyone has to spend so that one person doesn’t get a pair of socks and the other gets a Michael Kors handbag.
• All hands on deck! Give everyone a different job and make sure it matches each of your domestic skills. If one of you is renowned for bad cooking, keep away from the oven and set the table or do the washing up.
• Don’t forget to purchase all the decorative items such as Christmas napkins, crackers and party poppers. It just won’t be the same without them!

Do you have any tips for the perfect student Christmas dinner? Let us know in the comments.