

After successfully showing us how to prepare Christmas dinner in advancehow to prepare Christmas dinner in advance, Kate Hall is back with her tips on how to store your Christmas Day leftovers safely, to avoid food waste.
8 minutes to read
The two main reasons for knowing how to store your Christmas Day leftovers are ensuring food safety and avoiding food waste.
When you have lots of guests joining you for Christmas dinner, it can be hard to gauge just how much food you really need. A lot of us would rather cook too much than too little (it is Christmas, after all), but this brings with it the risk that lots of food will go to waste. This is especially true if it’s left to sit out for hours because you’re enjoying the festivities.
However, as we now know that food waste is a bigger contributor to the climate crisis than plastic waste, it’s more important than ever that we work to reduce food waste. But we’ve also got to do it safely.
Food safety is really important – particularly for young children, pregnant women, those with weakened immune systems and the elderly.
From a food safety perspective, all the key points are highlighted on page 5 of Kate’s super-helpful download, The Stress-Free Christmas Dinner. All these are applicable to both preparing your Christmas dinner in advance, and also the food on the day.
Meat can be sliced and frozen, separated by pieces of baking parchment. make sure you wrap it well to protect it from freezer burn (or freeze it in a sauce such as gravy).
It can also be cut or torn into bite-size pieces and open frozen on a baking tray before putting in a freezer bag. These pieces can then be used in stir-fries, pasta dishes, risottos, curries, and other recipes. Pieces storied like this will be more prone to freezer burn so are best used within a few weeks. Although freezer burn isn’t dangerous, it affects quality, so if pieces are freezer burnt, they are fine to eat as long as the meat was handled correctly before freezing.
Slices can be made up straight into sandwiches – Kate has more information about freezing sandwiched in her Frozen Lunchbox guide.
Leftovers can be frozen, but remember the only reheat once rule. It’s best to slice your leftovers into usable portions before you freeze them so you can just reheat as much as you need in the future. Also, make sure you wrap them well to protect them from freezer burn.
Homemade gravy leftovers can be frozen if they have been cooked fresh. If you have made it in advance (or bought readymade) you’re best to freeze in small usable quantities as leftovers shouldn’t be reheated for a second time (and so shouldn’t be frozen)
Only freeze freshly prepared stuffing; if you prepped in advance and froze it then it’s best to freeze in usable quantities as it is not advisable to reheat more than once.
Cooked potatoes and veggies aren’t great after freezing and reheating, although it is safe to do this as long as food safety guidelines are followed. Kate recommends open freezing the leftover cooked vegetables and then using from frozen to make soups or stir-fries, which should then be eaten immediately. It’s not advisable to make soup with leftovers and then freeze it as you’ll then be reheating the leftovers more than once (first when you make the soup, and then when you reheat it to eat).
Most puddings and cakes will be freezable, although the texture may change, and some may be best eaten still frozen or partially frozen. It’s best to separate into single portions before freezing. One pudding that will not do well in the freezer is trifle, so it’s best to try to eat all of yours on the day!
If you enjoyed this post and would like more ideas to reduce your food waste, you might enjoy our posts on cooking with scraps and dumpster diving. And if you need some help with reducing your own food waste, why not head to the AIluna app now and try one of our food waste reduction dares? Just open the app and look for “The waste less lunch” or the “No more binning food” dare.
Kate Hall is the Founder of The Full Freezer™ and author of the e-book ‘The Full Freezer (Save Food, Save Time, Save Money)’.
She helps busy families reduce their food waste and cook from scratch more often by using their home freezers more effectively.
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