By CARROLL DU CHATEAU
After churning out meals and recipes all year round, chefs and food people are surely entitled to a Christmas Day free of cooking.
But no. In output-obsessed 2001 we could find only one career cook content to relax in the sitting room, glass of champagne in hand, not lifting a finger to help in the kitchen on Christmas Day.
Why? Increasingly chefs, such as David Williams of Pinot cellar and dining kitchen and Glorious Food catering, are open for business on Christmas Day. Others, including Annabel Langbein, thoroughly enjoy the ritual of Christmas cooking.
Glynn Christian wants to show off his new table and dinner service and polish up the silver for the first time since he returned to New Zealand three years ago.
Only one of our Christmas cooks, Annie Mantell of Mantell's banquet centre in Mt Eden, will take a serious day off this Christmas. After years of cooking, first at the French Cafe in Symonds St, now at her new Italian-inspired banquet centre in Mt Eden, she cannot wait to drive to her son Chris' place at Mangere Bridge, sit back and enjoy the food, fun and family.
"I can't think of anything worse than cooking on Christmas Day," she says. "I don't even know what we're having. At a guess it's probably going to be ham and turkey. We're taking all the tables and chairs from here and we'll have it in the garden."
Food writer and tour guide Jenny Yee, however, is one of those who can't stop getting involved. Come Christmas Eve she'll be at the airport, heading for Gisborne, complete with a chilly bin containing a salmon, champagne and a bottle of Dubonnet and a part-roasted duck.
"I guess it's more because I can't resist it," she says. "And of course when it's Mum's kitchen - and Mum's responsibility - cooking is so much more relaxing."
The Yee dinner is typical Chinese/New Zealand - lots of vegetables and a mix of tastes and traditions. The family starts slowly with fresh grapefruit and orange juice from trees in the garden, meanders through breakfast, then sits down to dinner early in the afternoon.
"We start with fresh crayfish salad with new potatoes - getting the crays is Dad's job." Next comes Jenny's salmon, baked whole in the oven with mustard and honey, and the Chinese roast duck which "just gets thrown into a hot oven to crisp the skin again and plump it out".
Only in the evening does Yee let her mother take over her kitchen again, when she prepares a Cantonese meal, usually a noodle dish with plenty of vegetables.
For David Williams of Pinot, in Orakei, Christmas means yet another day of work. And still this dedicated chef is planning to get up seriously early - "we have to be at the restaurant by 8 am" - and cook what he gamely calls "brunch" in bed for his wife, Habans. The man is talking 7 am.
"What I do is whitebait eggs - that is pan-fried whitebait with egg through it, which turns into a soft, beautiful omelette - with say, some toasted brioche.
"Then I'll open a very fine bottle of Veuve Cliquot ... I might do some strawberries to serve with it."
And doesn't Williams, who trained as a chef "a long, long time ago" get tired of food and cooking? "I guess food is my life, and I love my life," he says.
Despite her career as a cookbook writer, TV and radio cook and columnist in onHoliday magazine, Annabel Langbein is unashamedly dedicated to Christmas cooking. "We've been quite domestic this year," she says. "The children have made little Christmassy treats - florentines, meringues, Christmas mince tarts and gingerbread cut into funny little angels."
Langbein, who is working hard on a campaign to slow down her family's life, also encourages Sean, 9, and Rose, 7, to make the family's Christmas cakes, some of which double as gifts.
"We do five little cakes or two big ones," she says. "It's really fun. Sean loved mixing the 12 eggs and three kilos of fruit with his hands. They especially enjoyed seeing the cakes come out of the oven."
Then, come Christmas Day, Langbein is back in the kitchen. But, she smiles infuriatingly, 10 for lunch is no effort if you plan ahead. "I make this bread called gubana," she explains. "It's a very eggy, buttery brioche dough and I fill it with Christmas mince, chocolate and pine nuts. Then I roll it up as a big snail or as little balls."
The family munches their gubana while opening their presents - along with champagne for the adults and lemonade for the kids - to keep them going until lunch around 3 pm.
"And yes, I do cook the real dinner," says Langbein. This year the main dish will be double-cooked duck - a method where you give the duck a 40-minute blast in a hot (200 deg C) oven, pour off the fat, then add a cup each of stock and fresh orange juice, lower the heat to 170 deg C and finish it off, basting, for another hour.
As Langbein says, "I like duck when it's meltingly tender with crispy skin, I'm fantasising about it right now."
Dessert will be homemade pavlova with berry sauce (frozen raspberries or boysenberries stewed with cinnamon quills and a vanilla pod) followed by almonds, chocolates and florentines.
"I actually like that sense of overeating you get with Christmas," says the super-slender Langbein.
Herald food writer and caterer Sarah Brown has a slightly resigned air. "Of course I always cook on Christmas Day. Everyone expects me to."
As she admits, it's her own fault. She just can't help herself from getting into the kitchen when she sees the amateurs dithering about. "You have to get in there. I can't help myself suggesting a faster way of doing things."
This year Brown is spending Christmas with her boyfriend's family at Pauanui, where she's planning to start with seafood then move to turkey.
"Everyone seems to want turkey," she says. "I'm going to soak it in watered brine in the fridge for three days. It's a hint from an American woman who does this for Thanksgiving - apparently it means the turkey stays really moist, never dries out." And for Brown, that's where tradition ends. Her turkey will be rubbed with fresh sage, stuffed with a shitake mushroom forcemeat and accompanied by fresh vegetables such as garden peas with bacon and parmesan, followed by tiramisu for dessert.
"Absolutely I cook!" expostulates Ray McVinnie. "I couldn't possibly let anyone else into the kitchen at Christmas."
Another Herald food writer, Glynn Christian, echoes the sentiment. "I've actually been working the whole year towards this," he says. "It's my first chance to sit eight at the table and use all my silver and dinner services. It's virtually three years since I came back here to live and it's the first time I've had my table ready to go."
Both are planning non-traditional Christmas dinners. McVinnie is cooking braciole alla contadina (stuffed veal rolls with vegetable sauce) with extra potatoes and a salad to follow. Christian will probably do a fillet of beef rolled in porcini (mushroom) powder, roasted then drizzled with black truffle oil while it is still warm from the oven.
Both will be serving salmon as an entree - Christian a balik fillet of smoked salmon ("a strip taken from the top to the tail through the thickest part of the fish") bought at "utmost expense" from Caviar House in London.
"I'm still playing with ideas for serving that don't include vinegar or lemon," he says. "I'll probably do a cucumber and white wine jelly."
McVinnie, on the other hand, will be serving his first-course salmon fresh, cappaccio style - that is, sliced very thin, drizzled with the best olive oil he could find at Sabato and served with home-made Turkish bread.
For McVinnie, who has two children - Grace, 9, and Alexander, 14 - the secret is in the preparation, getting as much as possible organised the day before and planning the main meal for around 6 pm.
"I like serving the dinner course by course, with each one just as important as the one before," he says. "We start with champagne as an aperitif, then the salmon, veal, salad, cheese and pudding" all on separate plates, all served with a flourish.
And what's for pudding? "It's another question of good shopping rather than good cooking," answers McVinnie. "I'm assembling an Italian trifle, made by arranging sponge finger biscuits in the bottom of the bowl, sprinkling them with grappa, adding white peaches or strawberries then custard, (even he says the bought stuff will do at a pinch) then topping the whole gorgeous concoction with whipped cream and shaved Valrhona French chocolate.
Christian, meanwhile, intends to finish his meal with fresh strawberries in raspberry and rosewater sauce. As he says, if you plan well and have the main meal latish, everyone - including the cook - can join in the fun and games.
"The most important thing is to eat in the early evening so the cook has time to visit friends, have a snooze - to really have a Christmas too."
Professionals who can't stay out of the Christmas kitchen
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