The only Christmas dinner I’ll cook this year turned out nicely – and without a mountain of stress.

I spent about half the day leisurely preparing everything so there wasn’t a mad rush at the end. I’m glad I did. I made a beetroot salad with bocconcini, honeyed pecans and raspberries, dressed with a raspberry balsamic vinaigrette. And as a main, Glen’s favourite, pork belly with soy ginger dipping sauce.

I made the pork belly last year but unfortunately burnt the crackling a little (in some places, a lot) because I wasn’t used to the recipe. This year, I had a much better idea of what to do. I had to watch the crackling that it didn’t suddenly burn in the oven. I caught it just in time and it came out lovely.

I don’t eat pork so just cooked up some fish.

I also mixed up a batch of pomegranate sangria, which required half an hour of deseeding pomegranates. There’s a device in the supermarket that is supposed to help deseed pomegranates without all the fuss. When I started deseeding I thought about it and thought what a waste of money for something you’d probably only use a couple of times a year.

After 15 minutes, I wished I had one.

But I soldiered on and we had pomegranate seeds aplenty.

Kev and Adam came over about 6:30. They’d brought us a gift, a new game called Heads Up which is a mix of Celebrity Heads, Charades and Taboo. Good fun – the song humming round was the hardest.

Dinner went down well, the crunch of pork crackling a thrilling sound.

After dinner we played endless rounds of Pit, and then rounded dinner off with a fruit custard tart.

So it was a great evening and that’s all the Christmas dinner I’m making this year. We leave for Iceland in a few hours and I can’t wait. I seem to have packed a lot for six days.

All the food, except the fish and the tart, was made in the Thermomix and recipes came from Tenina’s Merry Christmix book or her website.