Treat your Mum to the perfect roast dinner this Mother’s Day

Beef, Chicken, Pork, Lamb or Veggie. The traditional Sunday roast usually centres around a choice of staple meat or perhaps a nut roast or you may even decide for some extra spuds and another yorkie in exchange for the meat option. What ever you decide you will want all the trimmings, and this means multiple things to cook. All with different methods, heat, timings and general preparations will need to be managed with military precision if you are to make the final buzzer and ensure you have happy guests!

If you’re opting for a beef roast dinner, make sure you choose a good piece of meat with a bit of fat, which will add flavour. Rib, sirloin or topside of beef are good cuts for a roast dinner. It should be dark in colour as this means it has matured.

If you’re doing pork you can go for some crackling. To get the best crackling, you should pat the skin dry with a paper towel, then evenly sprinkle sea salt over it and leave for 30 minutes in the fridge. The salt will draw out any moisture in the skin. Pat again with a paper towel to ensure its fully dry and then add salt, pepper and your chosen herbs to season before roasting.

An all-time favourite- Chicken. Done right, a roast chicken can be a wonderful thing. But too dry it can be a real downer on the meal. To keep it succulent take it out of the fridge an hour before you intend to start cooking it to bring it up to room temperature.

Low and slow is the plan when it comes to perfecting a leg of lamb. If you want soft, succulent meat then longer is defiantly better, as it not only gives your meat time to tenderise in the oven, but it allows the meat to take on the flavours of any marinades you may have added. But make sure the temperatures low!

Start with the time you want to eat and work backwards.
Find out how long it will take to cook your meat to your specifications. Take into account the weight of the meat and your own oven power.
Add an extra 15 – 25 minutes to that time to allow the meat to rest after it comes out of the oven.
The perfect roast potatoes need around 15 minutes part boil and 45 – 50 minutes roasting. They can be spread around the meat if oven space is an issue, and they can be left in the oven to finish off roasting in the juices once the meat has been removed.
Other roasted vegetables are around the same 45 minute mark so I add in them all at once. Unless you opt to steam or boil the veg which will lower the cook time to around 20 mins to boil the water and cook the veg so be aware of this.
Work back from your mealtime to 45 minutes and that is when your roast potatoes should go in to the oven
Work back another 15 minutes that’s time to part boil them.
If you have any thing else such as Yorkshire puddings then you need to work these in to the plan but a home made yorkie could take as little as 15 mins so these can be done as the meat is resting, that way it frees up some space in the oven too!