Christmas dinner came out very well yesterday, with most of the traditional spread of foods (except bread sauce: we forgot to get the milk and onion steeping earlier in day). The least traditional aspect was that, for the second or third year in a row, we had a separate turkey breast roll and leg rather than a whole bird.

The advantage of this is that each piece can be cooked as required; they really are quite different types of meat. It also avoids the structural challenges of a whole bird – a large cavity, often stuffed with a pork-based meat mix, with breast and leg exposed on the outside. We still got the breast slightly overdone through playing it very safe on the temperatures, but the leg, although well browned, was spot on inside. I’m sure I’ll have the challenge of cooking a whole turkey again at some point in the future and, just as I do with programming, I think my first step will be to break the problem down into smaller parts!