Our Xmas dinner was cold last year cos our kitchen is freezing -any suggestions

[Mercedes]

I cooked a roast dinner for my folks last night and It was cold whn it got to the table. That reminded me that our dinner was cold when it got to the table.

The problem is the kitchen is tiny so you have to open the windows to cope with the heat from the oven and boiling pans. When you do that the room becomes bearable but when you transfre the roast potaties/veg etc onto serving dishes the draft from outside cools them immediately.

There is very little worktop space so I can't do this elsewhere and my serving dishes don't have lids. If I remmeber right I stuck some stuff back in the oven and then they burnt as I altrenatively sweated or froze.

Any tips or organisational techniques or timings to avoid frozen or burnt food would be such a help.

Got 6 for dinner.

heat the plates ...

cover things which have finsihed cooking with foil if you don't have lids

Put the plates in the oven and make sure that they are quite warm (you should be able to handle them with a towel or an oven glove, but not so hot that they will shatter) That will keep the food hot for long enough for people to eat it.

Tis never going to be possible to keep everything piping hot as you have so much stuff to put on the plates - by the time you've done the last bit, the first bit is cooling down, but nice, hot plates should go a long way to making sure that most things are as hot as poss.

The foil's a good idea-I'll give it a go.

I have some vague memory of my dp and I fighting in the kitchen last year about heating the plates. I think I thought his suggestion was a little bit too late to tell me this when we're about to eat and he'd been sleeping in the living room with the rest of my family!

I'll just have to remember this year although personally I hate a heated plate.