If it wasn’t enough that we were thinking that we were being restricted to seeing only 2 other families over Christmas, that has now been restricted further, with some families in tier 4 now unable to mix with anyone else on Christmas Day. This leaves some people with a massive turkey that they now have to eat on their own or just with a small number of family members. So if you need help with how to cut up a turkey – here it is!

Turkey is obviously the traditional dinner to have at Christmas, and turkeys do tend to come in larger sizes! Smaller turkeys were sold out quite quickly so some people had to order bigger birds than they would have liked. This has not really helped and means that more people are likely to have surplus turkey even before the new restrictions were announced.

Maybe you can split up the turkey and hand it out (with social distancing!) to other members of the family if they are near enough (or neighbours who may have been planning to go elsewhere), or maybe you can just freeze a certain amount of it to eat later.

You can cut up the turkey and perhaps just cook the crown for Christmas Day as that may well provide you with enough meat for a few days anyway. Then use the leftovers from Christmas Day to make your turkey sandwiches and turkey curry etc.

One thing that you will need to do this is a really sharp knife – and be sure to take a lot of care cutting it if your knife is really sharp. If you don’t have a knife sharpener then you can improvise by sliding the knife blade a few times along the unglazed part of the underside of a mug – but obviously a knife sharpener is ideal!

Here is one great video that shows you how to butcher the turkey and leave yourself with quite a few portions:

If you do have extra food that you can’t do anything with then it is worth using the food waste App ‘Olio’ where you can give away food to other people. Obviously you need to take account of restrictions in your area so that you don’t break the rules 🙂