Christmas Eve Dinner When Nobody Wants to Cook

By Jodie Smith, Product & Hamper Manager at The Gourmet Pantry.

The best Christmas Eve dinner is one pan, half an hour, and nothing that competes with tomorrow. Pasta built on a good jar of sauce, a paella kit on the stovetop, or bread, olives and crackers eaten standing up while the presents get wrapped. Buy the cupboard half of it in November and the 24th largely looks after itself.

Christmas Eve is the meal nobody plans and everybody still has to solve. The shopping is either done or it is not, the fridge is already full of things for tomorrow, and somebody has to be fed at seven o'clock. Cooking a second serious meal on the 24th is how people arrive at Christmas lunch already tired. Our gourmet meals range is built for this kind of night: a jar or a kit, one pan, and dinner that does not need a plan.

The rule for the 24th: do not compete with tomorrow

Three things are in short supply on Christmas Eve, and none of them is food. Oven space, fridge space and patience. Tomorrow's lunch has claimed the first two by about four o'clock, so a Christmas Eve dinner that wants a roasting tin and a clear shelf is a fight you have picked with yourself. Anything that goes stovetop to bowl wins on the 24th, even if it would lose on any other night of the year.

The second half of the rule is the washing up. A dinner that leaves one pot and four bowls is worth more on Christmas Eve than a dinner that tastes marginally better and leaves the kitchen looking like a service. If the house is already full of people, put something out to pick at from five o'clock so nobody hovers, then feed everyone properly at seven and shut the kitchen.

Four dinners, none of them over half an hour

Each of these is one pan or no pan, and most of what they need can sit in a cupboard from the day it arrives.

1. Pasta with one good jar. The entire dinner is a pot of salted water and something you bought weeks ago. Ottolenghi Calabrian chilli and tomato pesto, $12.95 for 170g, is the jar for a table that likes heat: stir it through hot pasta off the heat with a spoonful of the cooking water, then grate cheese over the top. For a milder crowd the roasted aubergine and tomato sauce, $14.95 for 350g, is charred aubergine, ripe tomatoes and garlic, and it asks for nothing beyond a crumble of feta and whatever herbs are still alive on the windowsill. Both live in the pasta and risotto range alongside the dried pasta, so they arrive in the same box. If somebody has come home from the fish run with prawns, our prawn linguine with Calabrian chilli pesto is that same jar doing more work for about ten minutes more effort.

2. A paella kit on the stovetop. One wide pan, no oven, and it feeds four out of a single box. The El Avion paella kit is $69.95 for four serves, a shade under $17.50 a head, and it has the useful quality of turning dinner into something the room watches rather than something one person does alone at the stove. Follow the pack for what to add on the night. If you have not cooked one before there is a short video recipe on the site.

3. Dinner that is honestly a snack. Plenty of households give up on the idea of a Christmas Eve meal altogether, and they are not wrong. A board of cheese, bread and cold things is a legitimate dinner on the one night of the year when lunch tomorrow is going to be enormous. VPC parmesan crackerthins are $2.95 for 100g and thin enough to disappear under a wedge of brie, and a jar of Kangaroo Island Mediterranean olives, $7.95 for 185g, is a mixed pick from across the harvest, naturally fermented and cured at different stages of ripeness, so one bowl gives you several olives rather than one repeated. The rest of that shelf sits in festive entertaining essentials.

4. The one you already cooked. The smartest Christmas Eve dinner is usually one that was decided in November and came out of the freezer on the day. Anything braised, portioned and frozen ahead needs forty minutes in a low oven and no attention at all, which makes it the one exception to the no-oven rule. Our guide to make-ahead Christmas food covers what freezes properly and what only pretends to.

What to have in the cupboard by mid-December

The reason Christmas Eve turns into a crisis is almost never the cooking. It is that the good jar is not in the house. Everything in the list above except the cheese and the seafood is shelf-stable, which means it can be ordered in October or November and forgotten about until the night it is wanted. Two jars of sauce, a packet or two of dried pasta, crackers, olives and a bag of nuts is a dinner for six that costs less than the takeaway it replaces, and none of it takes up fridge space you are about to need.

Orders placed before 12pm on a weekday leave our Corio warehouse the same day, and shipping is free Australia-wide on orders over $100. From there it travels with Australia Post, so the 23rd is not a plan. Australia Post confirms its Christmas dates in October each year; in practice, treat mid-December as the last comfortable window for anything that has to be in the house before the 24th, and earlier again if it is going interstate.

Christmas Eve dinner questions

What should I make for Christmas Eve dinner?

Make the simplest thing that does not use the oven. Pasta with a good jar of sauce, a one-pan paella or risotto, or a board of cheese, crackers and olives if the house is full and nobody is sitting down anyway. The test is not how it tastes, it is whether the kitchen is clear by nine o'clock.

What is a traditional Christmas Eve meal in Australia?

There is no single Australian tradition on the 24th. Most households keep it light because lunch the next day is large, so seafood, salads, a barbecue or a grazing board are the usual answers. Families with Italian, Polish or German heritage often do the opposite and make Christmas Eve the main event, with the 25th as the quieter day.

What can I cook on Christmas Eve with no oven?

Anything that lives on the stovetop. Pasta with a jarred sauce takes about twelve minutes, a paella kit takes half an hour in one wide pan, and a risotto needs a pot and someone willing to stir. Cold options need no heat at all: cured fish, cheese, bread, olives and crackers, with a bowl of nuts to keep people going.

What do Italians eat on Christmas Eve?

Fish, mostly. Christmas Eve is kept lean in much of Italy, with no meat before midnight, so La Vigilia leans on seafood: salt cod, marinated anchovies, clams with pasta, fried calamari. The Feast of the Seven Fishes with its fixed count is largely an Italian-American expansion of that idea rather than something you would find in every Italian house.

If you want the 24th handled before December starts, two or three jars from the gourmet meals range and a packet of good dried pasta will do it, and they will still be there in February if Christmas Eve turns into fish and chips at the beach instead. For the rest of the season, from the nibbles to the leftovers, start with our guide to Christmas food in Australia.