Christmas Eve is the perfect day to get ahead of the game and I've got a gorgeous foolproof
gravy recipe that you can make in advance. So I thought, as it's Christmas I'm going
to dig into my archive and give you a reminder of just how it's done.
Hey, what's going on? Do you want to get involved? Hey?
Okay, this is an absolute winner and must, every Christmas.
Roughly chop up two sticks of celery, two carrots and two onions. I'm just going to
take the worst of the paper because it's all going to go through a sieve. Chuck in five
or six sage leaves for the most incredible fragrance and a few torn up bayleaves. Some
rosemary and two rashers of smoky bacon. That will just give it a little smokiness
hidden in the background and then the secret ingredient. Chicken wings. I'm using 14 for
a big batch but 8 will do. Just chop into them with the heel of your knife to max out
that flavour. Add a teaspoon of salt, some pepper and two pieces of star anise.
Roast this in an oven for about an hour, sort of 200 degrees Celcius, 400 degrees Farenheit
and then I'm going to turn it into the best, best gravy ever.
Doing this on Christmas Eve means you've got guaranteed maximum flavour and less washing
up to do on Christmas Day. This is what it looks like after an hour.
Look you can see it's all gone crispy. This meat here is the sweetest most lovely meat
in my view in the whole bird. Erm, I'm just going to put this tray now on
a high heat. This will really boost up the flavour of your gravy. I want to end up with
two pints, so four tablespoons of regular flour to thicken it, followed by two litres
of water. And then give this about 25 minutes to simmer away and of course you extract all
of that flavour and as you can see Petal, is well into this.
Give it a mash up every now and again to extract all of the beautiful flavour and then let
us rejoice. A tray of festive get ahead love. What am I talking about?
And obviously the one thing to remember is when you put that in the tray of all the turkey
juices to reheat it, you're going to get loads more flavour again so it's going to almost
be a double gravy. That's amazing. That's like roast dinner in
itself, who needs the rest of it actually?! Pop it in a cold garage or in the fridge and
the next day just bring it to the boil and the next day you've got the best gravy ever.
Job done, no fuss, have another snowball. Petal, it's been emotional.
Oh no, that's never happened before! Come here, come back to me.
Daddy's back, it's okay. Can she try some gravy?
No Jamie, don't be so ridiculous. Come on. Oh please, this could be the first bit of
proper food she's had.
And that's on camera dammit!
She's only human!