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Locally sourced ingredients to make your Christmas magical.

M&S Food, proud sponsors of Mark Moriarty's Off-Duty Chef Christmas.

♪ (festive music) ♪

Christmas in my house usually means I'm on cooking duty.

Perks of the job.

So this year, I've got six friends coming over to trial

the Christmas menu.

Coming up, a quick make-ahead starter that can be finished off on the day.

A succulent slow roast ham glazed in soy, honey, and orange.

And an option for vegetarians too.

There's always one, so let's get them something they will love.

For me, that's almost the hero of this Christmas.

For dessert, a decadent festive take on a family classic.

First, let's get cracking on the starters.

We all know Christmas is a busy time of year, so I want to keep things as

simple as possible on the day by pre-preparing as much as I can,

including this really simple starter that can be made in advance

and just assembled on the day.

The first thing we need to do is prep our onions for a French onion soup.

First, half the onions and peel off all the skins.

You need a good few here for the soup since they'll soften and caramelise

beautifully as they cook.

I'm going to use the mandolin, a key piece of kitchen equipment that

you can add to your Christmas list.

And very, very carefully, we're going to slice them really

thinly straight into our pot.

And don't go too far down the onion.

I use that as a bit of a safety mechanism.

I don't mind wasting that if it saves my fingers.

If you don't have a mandolin, don't worry.

Just use a sharp knife and slice the onions as finely as you can.

There we go.

Time to cook the onions.

These are going to take between 45 and 50 minutes, believe it or not.

To help them along, I'm going to add a good amount of

vegetable oil, plain vegetable oil.

Then I'm going to add a couple of knobs of cold butter.

Then the key point for me for French onion soup is is that we

want really sweet onions.

And how we do that is we add an exact amount of two tablespoons

of sea salt at this point.

What that helps do is draw out all the sugars in the onion,

which will then help them caramelise, go lovely and golden brown,

and add a lovely sweet base to the soup.

Now, I've just turned the flame down and get my wooden spoon in there,

and this is going to take a lot of patience.

So what the salt will do is it'll dry the moisture from the onion

so that evaporates.

They'll go nice golden brown. I'm It's going to take a while,

so I'll go wrap some Christmas presents,

call back in every five or six minutes,

and just give it a quick stir.

45, 50 minutes later, your 15 onions has been reduced

to beautiful caramelised onion.

Next, add a bit of plain flour, cook it out for another minute

to bring everything together.

Now we are going to be using comté cheese, which is very classic

in a French onion soup, but I don't want to waste any of it.

Before I grate the cheese, I just take that nice rind,

take that off on both sides, and I'm going to get that in with our onions.

What it'll do is it'll add a lovely depth of flavour to the soup without

wasting anything this Christmas.

So I turn the heat up, and I'm now going to treat

this like I would a sauce.

I'm going to add a good glass of white wine,

and you'll see immediately it will start to thicken in that flour.

Scrape all those caramelised bits off the base of the pan.

That's all full of flavour.

The flour is thickened up into a paste.

The cheese is melting down.

I'm going to go in with my stock.

And I want to fill this right up until we have basically

enough for six bowls of soup.

You can use beef or vegetable stock here.

Now, as that's coming up to the boil, I'm going to make a bouquet

garni with some herbs.

I've got some thyme, some bay leaves, and some rosemary.

What we're going to do is use a little piece of string just to tie

them up because I don't want these wilting down.

Give that about 20 minutes. We're ready to assemble the soup.

Now, what makes this soup is essentially the cheese

on toast on top.

So I have some pre-sliced Our sourdough bread.

We're just going to toast it off.

We're also going to need to grill our cheese, so we need to set

the oven to the grill.

Nice golden brown toast. Into play come my three soup bowls.

I found a cutter that matches the width of that bowl,

and I'm just going to cut out a nice disc that will fit on top,

and that's going to just float beautifully on top of our soup.

After about 30 minutes, go ahead and take out

the bouquet garni and cheese round.

They've worked their magic at this point.

So quick taste.

It's actually really sweet from the time we've done

caramelising those onions slowly, but it'll take a little bit of help.

So we're going to touch a black pepper.

Now it just needs a little bit of a salty edge right at the end.

Mix it all through.

Now, once you're happy with your seasoning,

we'll bring the pot to our soup bowls,

and all we have to do is assemble.

Gently ladle the soup into oven-proof bowls,

filling them nearly to the top, but leaving a little space.

Now place your perfectly sized pieces of toast on top of the soup

and cover them with a generous layer of comté cheese.

Now, do not be shy at this stage.

It is Christmas after all.

This is going to be good.

And all that's left to do is get them under

that roaring hot grill, golden, brown, and bubbly.

Look at that.

So the soup is bubbling around from the outside.

The crouton has gone nice and soft, and you've got that lovely golden

brown cheese on toast on top.

That looks and smells absolutely delicious.

That is just food you want to eat.

Simple, classic, really simple ingredients.

And for me, that is restaurant quality cooking

without any of the fuss.

♪♪

Now, my wife told me this is the nicest

dish I have ever made her, and let me tell you, she is a tough critic.

So I think it's worthy of a Christmas dessert this year.

What makes it special is this.

These are croissants, and it's my take

on a bread and butter pudding we just brought to the next to the level.

So what we do is we get a good solid baking dish and some soft butter.

So this is butter at room temperature.

What we're going to do is we're going to start off by lining the dish.

So we get a good amount of butter in there.

Save that for the croissants.

And I just take a pastry brush to it.

And what we want to do is line all the edges with that soft butter.

This is going to make sure that the pudding doesn't stick,

and it's going to save us a lot of time of hassle when it

comes to the wash up after.

Just I just want to make sure your butter has come to room temperature.

This will take a long while. Onto our croissants.

Really, really simple.

These are two or three days old, so I don't want to waste anything.

And stale is fine because we're going to soak them at the end.

So just take my knife, go into the middle,

and then after that, stand them up into four little triangles.

So that's what we're looking for.

Four triangles from each piece of croissant.

Just so they look like little Christmas treats,

These croissants are made with lots of butter,

but it is Christmas, so it's not enough.

We come back to our softened butter.

We're going to line up our baking dish with each triangle of croissant

after they have a little bit more butter.

Start by layering your croissants flat across the base

of the baking tray.

This gives the pudding a nice bit of height.

Once that's done, stand the croissants upright around the dish.

Here we go.

Fill up the baking tray.

Now, I need it just like that.

We're going to bring this to the next level for Christmas.

Two ingredients I love to bring out at Christmas,

some 70 percent dark chocolate and some roasted pistachio nuts.

With the chocolate chips, I'm just going to take them

out and cut them in half.

What we're going to do is we're going to find all the gaps in between

the croissants that we've layered up.

We're going to fill them with chocolate chips

and the pistachio nuts.

So as it bakes off and settles after and rests

means when we get our spoon through there, there's going to be lovely

pockets of melted chocolate.

Can see why my wife like this one.

Same with the pistachio nuts.

Just going to crush them up, roll my knife through them.

Now, once they're all sliced, we're going to come back

to our croissant pudding.

So what we want to do here is find all the little gaps

in between your triangles.

Where you see them, we're going to fill them with pockets

of chocolate of pistachios.

The magic to this is you tuck them in between the layers and they

bake and go nice and soft in there.

A little surprise when you stick your spoon through it.

Don't waste any of this.

And then once it's all in on top, just again, get your hands in there.

Give it a little shake.

Make sure it all falls down into the middle of the pudding.

So that's it. All layered up.

I can leave that in the fridge for one, even two days.

And then what we do is when it's ready to cook,

we can take it out on Christmas Day, soak it, and bake it in the oven.

Now, to go along with my pudding, I'm going to make a cold custard.

Using a Christmas favourite, Irish cream liqueur.

Again, I'm going to make it today to make Christmas Day

as stress-free as possible.

Now, get a heavy-based sauce pan on a medium heat.

Pour in your cream and your cream liqueur,

then scrape in the seeds from two vanilla pods.

Pop the pods it boils into the cream as well to get every bit of flavour.

Let it come to a gentle simmer.

In a separate bowl, add your icing sugar and six egg yokes.

Now, with a spatula, we just want to create a paste

with the egg yokes and sugar.

I don't add a whisk here because I don't want to add too

much air to the mix.

It ends up in the custard cooking unevenly.

This is the silky consistency you're looking for.

Now, once the icing sugar is mixed in with that egg yoke,

we're going to come to our just boiling cream mix And I'm going

to pour about half of it in.

What we just want to do is loosen up the egg yoke

so that it's nicely mixed together with the cream and the sugar.

We just bring that mix back into our pot with all the flavours.

Once that's done, we're going to keep an eye on it now on the heat,

nice and slowly over low heat until it coats the back of a spoon.

So this only takes a minute or two. Have a look at this.

So I think this is ready.

I get my spoon in there and you can see it's just coating

the back of the spoon.

So now it can go into my bowl, lovely and thick.

Once that's done, a little trick

to stop this forming a skin when it cools in the fridge,

I just get a little bit of baking basement and just cut

about half of the way in in each of the corners,

creating this star-like thing.

And then what I do is I press the middle of it down

into the custard, and it will fold nice and neatly over itself,

making sure none of the air can get at that custard and form a skin.

So that's the custard made.

Pudding is layered and in the fridge, and we're pretty much ready

until it's time to serve on the big day.

♪♪

M&S Food, proud sponsors of Mark Moriarty's Off-Duty Chef Christmas.

This Christmas, I'm showing you some of my favourite recipes

to cook for a crowd.

I've got six friends coming over a little later on, so it's a busy

day and it's time to crack on.

Time for the main event.

So this Christmas, I'm focusing on ham,

which was always my favourite part of the traditional dinner.

Got a three kilo ham here.

The bone is out, which is going to reduce the cooking time for me.

Nicely tied up with the skin on.

Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to wrap this in tinfoil.

So what I'm trying to do here is get the tinfoil really tight alongside

the edge so none of the steam or liquid is going to escape

while we cook in the oven.

Now, once you're happy, which I am, that is completely sealed,

what we do is we get the ham into the oven 200 degrees, 3 hours,

and then we'll rest it for about an hour.

You'll have a perfectly cooked ham without any mess here.

So I have one vegetarian on the guest list today,

and I don't want them to feel left out.

So I'm going to cook them a swede.

All I need to do is get it pealed and nicely shaped to start.

Be sure to peel away all of the tough green exterior.

Using a peeler here might make things a bit easier.

Now, in order to turn something that, let's be realistic, is quite basic

into something really special for the big day, I'm going

to cook it in a lot of flavour.

So we're going to treat this like we would a piece of meat.

The first thing I want to do is the really traditional thing

we would do with a ham. We're going to stud it in cloves.

Add a few cloves to the sweet.

These will gently infuse it with a wonderful aroma

and flavour as it cooks.

Place the sweet into an oven-proof dish.

Add vegetable stock, splash of soy, orange juice,

and a couple of tablespoons of honey.

Once that's in there, I'm going to cover it in tinfoil,

ready to go in the oven a little bit later on.

Same as the ham, make sure that tinfoil is

completely sealed in all over.

So I'm going to set that aside, ready to go in the oven a little bit later.

Now it's time for the Christmas staple of red cabbage.

So red cabbage, one of my favourite things to eat, not just at Christmas,

but all through the winter.

My favourite thing about this recipe is we're basically going to get all

the ingredients in a pot, bring it to the boil,

and it's as simple as putting it in the oven and slow braising.

Now, thinly slice the red cabbage.

A sharp knife or mandolin works well here.

The slices should be wafer-thin to ensure they cook evenly.

Then add two slice red onions, grate in two apples,

and give your area a quick cleanup.

So that's the base of our red cabbage in the pot.

Now I'm just going to fill it full of flavour.

So I'm going to add a little bit of spice, one cinnamon stick,

and two star anise.

Then our sweet and sour place.

To the cabbage mixture, add red wine vinegar, brown sugar,

orange juice, a couple of tablespoons of mixed spice,

and a hearty spoonful of cranberry sauce for that festive sweetness.

If you want big flavours,

you need big quantities.

A little bit of orange zest.

Then to finish it off, because we added our graded apple,

I'm going in with a little bit of apple juice

and season it up with some salt and black pepper.

So once that's done, I'm going to get my lid on the red cabbage.

We're going to cook that a little later on.

Very nice.

So the ham's looking absolutely perfect.

Cooked the whole way through,

but it's very important that it rests.

So tinfoil goes back on.

I'm going to leave it behind me to rest for at least an hour

before we glaze it up.

Now, back to our swede and our red cabbage.

Before they go in the oven to cook,

it's very important we bring them both to the boil.

That's going to improve the flavour and reduce the cooking time.

So our red cabbage is coming up to the boil.

That's our cue to get our lids on.

And these are both going in the oven at 180 degrees for one hour.

♪♪

Okay, we're getting close. Good shirt is on.

Can I keep it clean?

Going to start bringing everything together here for the main event.

And the first thing I want to do is get some carrots on the go.

And this is what we would call carrots Vichy.

So it's a classic recipe where you basically cook them

in stock and butter.

Once your carrots are pealed, cut off the green tops,

then roughly cut them into chunks.

Get some plain vegetable oil into a frying pan before

turning onto a high heat.

Place your carrots in just until they start to caramelise.

So we have a little bit of colour on the carrots now, so I'm going

to go in with a few coriander seeds.

So nicely toasted.

I'm going to go in with some stock.

Beautiful.

Add in a few knobs of butter, a teaspoon of honey,

and a simple mixture of corn flour with a bit of water.

This will help keep the sauce silky smooth as it thickens.

Then it's as simple as making sure they're on a high heat.

Take for about 20, 25 minutes.

Just forget about them.

That gives me time to get back to my ham.

So the ham has been resting out for an hour, which is really

important for the texture.

Beautiful.

So the first thing we're going to do is we need to remove these strings

and carefully peel off any remaining skin from the ham using

a knife or the back of a spoon.

So just carefully release it.

What we want to leave behind is that fat layer because

that fat is full of flavour.

Now, once that skin is off, it's done its job.

So we get rid of that.

I'm just going to leave it at room temperature just

for five or six minutes.

I want that fat layer to dry out because that's very important for the

next stage where I'm going to make.

This is like a cheat's glaze.

So we're not going to be going in and out of the oven

making a really dirty tray. I'm going to do this all in a pot.

For the glaze, combine honey, brown sugar, and soy sauce

in a small sauce pan.

Now, traditionally, at this point, what we do is we mix this together

in its raw form, add it onto the tray,

get it back in the oven, in, out, spoon, and end up with a tray that is

about three days away from being clean.

So what I do at home is I take a little bit more

of our corn flour from earlier.

I add in a good heaped teaspoon of that.

And then I bring this to the boil while whisking,

and it will create this beautiful glaze that's really,

really thick, almost like glue that we can paint onto our ham.

So once it comes to the boil and the corn flour thickens it,

it's ready to paint on the ham.

And already you'll see that that glaze is going to stick lovely.

We just want to make sure that every little corner, every crevice

is covered in our glaze.

So we're going to add a couple of finishing moves just

to bring it to that next level.

These finishing touches make this dish a true showstopper

that will wow your guests.

Roughly chop some glacé cherries and sprinkle them on top of the ham.

Then finish with a handful of fresh thyme leaves, a dash of nutmeg,

and the zest of an orange.

Very pleased with that.

I'm going to plate it up.

Just going to add a little bit of that excess glaze from the base

of the tray because that is still full of flavour.

So once we've got the plate nicely filled with that glaze,

just very carefully get our ham neatly onto the plate,

and it's ready for the table.

Oh, Mark, I'm so excited for this food.

Oh, wow.

We've got the ham done.

Carrots are about five minutes away.

Now the cabbage and the swede from the oven.

The red cabbage reveal.

Look at that.

That is the smell of Christmas.

While we're here, we just check on our swede.

Oh, yeah, beautiful.

You can see there, the clothes have done.

It's soft to touch with a little bit of glaze left in the base.

So what I'm going to do is before I plate up the red cabbage,

I'm just going to put this sweet back on the heat so

that glaze will glaze the top of it.

We're nearly there on the glaze for the swede and carrots are

just about 30 seconds away.

And have a look how that corn flour has helped us.

So it's reduced right down and we've got a beautiful,

almost sauce-like consistency to the glaze.

Now it's time to turn them off, plate them up.

Look at that.

So for me, that's almost the hero of this Christmas.

We've got our glazed swede, braised red, cabbage,

the carrots Vichy, and then our ham,

which has been nicely slow-roasted and glazed in the oven.

We're going to add it to the table.

I'll do the share stall for my guests. We've got the usual.

We've got the sprouts, the rose potatoes, the gratin, the gravy.

But for me, this is Christmas this year.

It's fuss free, not too much wash-up.

And if you perfect your timings,

you can be sure these are all packed with flavour.

There you go. Thank you very much.

Cheers everybody.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Yes, it's hard to measure.

Oh, wow.

Wow.

Now, while they're talking into the main course,

I've got just enough time to finish off the dessert.

So I have the croissant pudding that we prepared earlier.

Now, all I'm going to do is make a little type of custard that's going

to soak in it before we bake it.

First up, I'm going into a bowl with some cream,

and then a little bit more because it's so delicious at Christmas,

of our Irish cream liqueur.

Then we're going to sweeten it up with a little bit of icing sugar,

about two tablespoons of vanilla extract,

and then just to bind it all together as it soaks,

going in there with two whole eggs.

Then I just want to whisk this all together, breaking up the eggs,

making sure that sugar is dissolved.

Now, once that's mixed together, ladle.

Be very careful. You're wearing a white shirt.

It's Christmas Day.

Do not get anything on it.

Ladle your custard all over your pudding

and finish off with some soft brown sugar.

And there it is into the oven at 185 degrees for about 40 to 45 minutes.

Look at that.

You can see while it's been in there, it's gone nice and soft throughout.

The sugar is caramelising and nice and crispy on top,

and you've got that melted chocolate literally pouring out of the middle.

Now, what makes dessert for me is hot pudding,

cold custard. Always works a treat.

Is it non-alcoholic?

♪♪

Clean plates all round.

I would say that's a complete success.

Unfortunately, I'm not in the restaurant,

so it looks like I'm on cleanup.

Happy Christmas, everyone.

For all my Christmas recipes featured...

Subtitling RTÉ 2024.

Locally sourced ingredients to make your Christmas magical.

M&S Food, proud sponsors of Mark Moriarty's Off-Duty Chef Christmas.