26 food hacks to help make Christmas easier

This is not the time to learn how to turn your fridge into a snowman or make an advent calendar out of a muffin tin. Ye gods. Instead, let's look at hacks and strategies that will get us through December without losing it big time in the kitchen.

1. "Christmas-ise" what you were going to cook anyway. Make your usual sausage rolls, burgers and meatballs, but with turkey mince instead of pork, and serve with cranberry sauce instead of tomato.

2. Make a lovely big grain salad, but add pomegranate seeds and toasted walnuts.

3. Make your favourite chocolate mousse or pannacotta, but serve with crushed candy canes.

4. You can even Christmas-ise your breakfast granola. Add dried cranberries, pistachios, shredded coconut and Christmas spices (nutmeg, cinnamon, mixed spice, ginger) to the dried ingredients, and pomegranate seeds and berries to the fresh.

5. Stick a prawn on it. Prawns make even the most casual gathering as Christmassy as hell. Split raw prawns down the middle, dot with flavoured butter (roasted tomato/wasabi/smoked maple syrup) and flash-grill.

6. Open a jar. Roast your pork belly, sure, but serve it covered with glowing jewels of Italian mustard fruits, or with a bowl of Christmas fruit mince, gently heated with balsamic vinegar. Japanese pickled ginger is great with smoked salmon.

7. Ready-made lemon curd is fabulous for pavlova and choux pastry puffs.

8. The secret of this year's turkey stuffing? Fruit mince.

9. Stick it in a roll. Everyone loves a soft, squishy, hipster bread roll, from kids to teenage dudes and oldies. Breadtop's soft dinner rolls come in packs of eight - brilliant for impromptu prawn cocktail rolls (toss roughly chopped, cooked prawns into mayo with a dash of Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco and tomato sauce, and stuff into just-warmed rolls with shredded lettuce); ham, pickles and mustard rolls; and left-over turkey and cranberry rolls.

10. Get your jolly reds and greens on. Add anything to your food that's red or green. Stockpile finely sliced red onion, pomegranates, beetroot, red and green chillies, red and green capsicum and cherry tomatoes.

11. Make a big tomato salsa ahead of time to put on everything from breakfast eggs to barbecued meats.

12. Dig out the spiralizer for zucchini spaghetti studded with cherry tomatoes.

13. As for raspberries, they are the Christmas baubles to your tree of food - tossed on top of cheesecakes, whizzed into berry-bright purees, frozen into sorbets. Cannot. Have. Enough. Raspberries.

14. I have one word for you: bacon. There's something about Christmas that makes you go the whole hog and eat your body weight in bacon.

15. Wrap chicken thighs in bacon and bake for 20 minutes until crisp.

16. Line muffin tins with bacon, crack in an egg and some tomato salsa and bake for 20 minutes, for fast egg and bacon tarts.

17. Crumble crisp bacon over green beans, peas and asparagus.

18. Use bacon to protect the Christmas turkey as it cooks. This way, you don't have to baste the turkey every half-hour AND you get crisp bacon to serve with it. Win/Win.

19. Cookie cutters are your friends. Especially the star ones. Cut your breakfast fruit into stars, your toast, your crepes, your chocolate, your cakes, and of course your biscuits.

20. Quick, we need pud. Buy brioche buns and stuff them with vanilla ice-cream and store-bought fruit mince.

21. Lightly toast big wedges of panettone and serve with bowls of summer berries, gently softened with sugar and mint.

22. Fill pretty glass jars with layers of crumbled fruitcake, custard and port wine jelly for a festive trifle.

23. Soften two or three flavours of ice-cream, then layer them in a terrine mould, re-freeze and serve in slabs.

24. Make it snow, make it snow. Dust any old cake with drifts of icing sugar, stick twigs of rosemary into the top to resemble a copse of fir trees, give it a final dust and you have an instant winter wonderland. I am so doing this to Mum's plum pudding.

25. Christmas-ise your kitchen. Make like Santa, and make a list. Smoked salmon, hot-smoked trout, dark chocolate, frozen cranberries. A big pack of icing sugar for all that edible snow.

26. Do an audit on your kitchen foil, baking paper and kitchen wrap and stock up. Your choice of cream, mascarpone, crème fraiche or yoghurt. Your choice of aioli, or mayonnaise. Ghee or duck fat (great for potatoes). Potatoes! And tomatoes. Frozen peas (so Christmassy). And don't forget the nuts: nothing says Christmas like a humungous bowl of nuts.