On Christmas Day, save your stress levels for arguing politics with Uncle Martin and let the dinner preparation be a smooth-running joy. One of Aotearoa’s top chefs showed Wyoming Paul how that’s done. 

It’s undeniable: supermarkets are stacked to the gills with pavlovas and Christmas mince pies, tinsel is adorning doorways, Michael Bublé’s optimistic crooning has returned, and people are turning up hungover to work on a Wednesday.

As well as being about friends and family, stockings and Santa, for many people Christmas is the most ambitious and often daunting cooking day of the year. I love to cook, but making a multi-course meal for an expectant, merry, increasingly hungry crowd can be far from cheerful and relaxing.

In the past, my experience has included arm cramp (making a pavlova for the first time, on the day, with only a regular whisk), preparing dishes that actually, no one wants to eat (a fried courgette salad is delicious, but not for a 10am brunch), and generalised resentment toward everyone else who isn’t cooking (not the Christmas spirit).

But I’m here to tell you, good reader: it doesn’t have to be that way. Cooking for Christmas can be rewarding and joyful, if you get the basics right.

Two weeks ago, I filmed Michael Meredith (of award-winning restaurants Meredith’s and Mr Morris) prepare an entire Christmas feast from scratch in a day. He calmly made two canapés, three sides, a slow roast porc scotch (yes, that is the correct spelling: think fine dining), and a baked and beautifully dressed side salmon (see the foot of this article to subscribe to his recipes). The next day at 8am he whipped up a meringue roulade and cocktails, and it was only polite to have cream and champagne for breakfast.

I’d had restless nightmares about all of this cooking the night before. I expected to be at his apartment until 10pm that first day, fretting and trying to take photos of prawn tartare long after the natural light had disappeared.

But Michael did everything, absolutely calmly, in about six hours – all the while saying, “Don’t worry – this part, you can prepare in advance.” Now, part of this is his being Michael Meredith: he doesn’t take 10 minutes to dice an onion. However, much of it is being organised and having a plan beforehand.

Here, distilled, is everything I learnt about preparing and cooking for Christmas, from the master.

Feature seasonal fruit and vegetables

It might be heavy, stodgy, wintry dishes like stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy that we see in American Christmas movies, but our own festive season is the perfect time for asparagus, berries, stone fruit, and fresh salads. We don’t wrap ourselves in scarves and make sand snowmen on Christmas, so why cook a Christmas lunch that’s out of season?

Limit dishes that need cooking in the oven

Look, if you have a single oven, don’t end up facing the prospect of braising a short rib, roasting potatoes, and baking a pavlova at once. It’s just not going to work. Plus, your dessert will taste like ribs.

Similarly, you aren’t going to be able to roast one dish at 220°C and another at 100°C at the same time.

Choose dishes that have the same oven temperature (Michael’s porc and salmon were able to be cooked simultaneously), or stagger your oven needs across the day – a baked canapé at the start of the meal, and a roast chicken two hours later.

Opt for dishes you can prepare in advance

Don’t design a menu where everything will be yuck if it isn’t served immediately after being prepared (steak, souffle, fresh salads, roast veggies). You don’t have 14 hands, or even 14 cutting boards.

Instead, choose desserts that you can make the day before (pavlova keeps well for a few days in an airtight container; no-bake cheesecake needs a night in the fridge); or even weeks in advance (Christmas cake, obviously). Make snacks that can be prepared, frozen, and then baked on the day (Michael did this with kūmara and feta pastries), or are even more delicious the next day (sauces, where flavours develop over time).

Prep, prep, prep

Even salads and other dishes that need assembling and cooking on the day, can be prepped the day before. It extends your cooking time, but vastly reduces your stress levels are there are fewer hours of feeling the utter frazzled panic of knowing there are seventeen things to be sliced, fried, stirred, roasted and drizzled, and only a few short hours until your family riots from hunger. Think of cooking on Christmas Eve as your present to your Christmas Day self.

Don’t do it alone

I once wanted to be the solo Christmas Kitchen Queen, but you know what? The role hits that unsweet spot between stressful and dull, and my favourite parts of the day were when someone decided to come and help me.

Get a bunch of co-cooks, or make your Christmas a pot-luck. If the word “pot-luck” makes you recoil in disgust and you’re the undisputed culinary puppet master of the family, sketch out what you want to be made and assign dishes to different people.

This, of course, I didn’t learn from Michael Meredith: he did literally everything by himself (although I did whip some cream for about three minutes – proud moment). But not all of us are Michael, which means that not all of us can orchestrate the perfect Christmas feast alone.

Wyoming Paul’s startup Grossr has just released a Christmas menu by Michael Meredith, with recipes, cooking videos, ingredient lists, and a preparation guide.