Snack food that is consumed on New Year’s Eve at a party are called Evetizers. Why? Because many years ago a friend of ours threw his first New Year’s Eve party in his tiny studio apartment (it actually wasn’t that tiny—it had a sleeping alcove, so nowadays it would be considered a spacious 2-bedroom) and he got pretty severe party host jitters. His party was a success and he was especially proud because he had made all the food himself. He confided to me that he was most worried about the “New Year’s Eve appetizers” portion of it but in his drunken excitement that came out as “evetizers” and thus a handy portmanteau was born.
1. Sausage Balls
1 lb. hot sausage (bulk, so it comes like ground beef, not in links)
1 egg
2 tbsp. butter, melted
2 cup grated sharp white Cheddar cheese, room temperature
3 cups Bisquick (biscuit mix)
Combine all ingredients by hand, which is fun, like making a meat loaf, and shape into 1-inch balls. Put these on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350°F for 12 to 15 minutes. You should get ~ 4 dozen balls.
2. Spinach Cheese Puffs
1 tube of Pillsbury Crescent rolls (should be 8 pieces)
2 cups fresh chopped spinach
6 oz. of a really soft, spreadable cheese, like Boursin or Laughing Cow Swiss or a triple-cream Brie, room temp
garlic powder
basil
oregano
ground pepper
Mix cheese in a bowl with chopped spinach, garlic, basil, oregano, and pepper. This is also best done by hand. Unroll Crescent rolls. Place a 1/2 tablespoon of cheese mixture in the middle of each Crescent triangle. Fold dough over cheese mixture. Make sure mixture is firmly in middle of dough with no opening.
Place on baking sheet. Sprinkle garlic powder and basil over each piece and bake according to instructions for Crescent rolls.
Makes 8 puffs, so quadruple the recipe.
3. Party Sandwiches
Do not confuse this with the teenage Hope Lange party sandwiches. These are actually quite good.
1/4 cup yogurt
1/2 cup ricotta cheese
2 dozen olives, 1 dozen each of black and green
3 tbsp. red bell peppers, finely chopped
1 tbsp. dried oregano flakes
2 tbsp. olive oil
salt and pepper to taste.
32 or so “cocktail” slices of rye bread (these are square an come in sleeves)
Deseed and chop the olives. Combine them with all the other ingredients, adjust salt and pepper and spread the mix over 16 of the rye squares (or however many you can fill) and top with and equal number, let’s say 16.
4. Charles Dickens’s Punch
No good New Year’s Eve party is without a punch.
This came to me from my one of my favorite websites, atlasobscura.com, particularly their Gastro Obscura vertical, and they got it from https://libwww.freelibrary.org/digital/item/cdc423201. Since we are heading into a Dickensian-era Financial Crisis with the spectacular collapse of the speculative crypto craze and there’s a Crimean War raging, I think New Year’s Eve 2022 should be the year that you make Charles Dickens’s Punch.
Yields 8 cups [so quadruple the recipe, at least]
3/4 cup demerara sugar
3 lemons
2 cups rum (Smith & Cross works well, or Stiggins’s Pineapple Rum, if you want a nod to Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers)
1 1/4 cups cognac (preferably Courvoisier VSOP) [I don’t know why they say that. Courvoisier is not the premium brand it used to be. It’s certainly ubiquitous, though.]
5 cups hot water
Lemon and orange wheels, for garnish
Freshly grated nutmeg, for garnish
Peel the lemons and set aside the fruit. In a heatproof bowl or Dutch oven [use a very clean oven-proof soup pot if you have one, for the quantity you’ll be making], combine the sugar and lemon peels and mix together. Set aside for 20–30 minutes for the citrus oils to release.
Add the rum and cognac to the bowl. Use a heatproof spoon [the bowl of the spoon is often coated in rubber, as is the handle] to pick up some of the mixture, then light the spoonful aflame and bring it into contact with the rest of the contents of the bowl. After allowing it to burn for about three to four minutes, cover to extinguish. [Yes, a flambéed punch! Dickens thought the punch needed to be “cooked.” You don’t really need to do this. I would need to, fond as I am of flambé-ing, but you don’t.]
Add hot tea or hot water, then squeeze in the juice of the lemons and cover. Let sit for five minutes, then uncover and garnish with citrus wheels and grated nutmeg. Ladle into glasses.
OR
AtlasObscura doesn’t say this, but Dickens does: you can let this cool (you can refrigerate the pot once it’s cooled down; Dickens could not) and then ice it. I’m not a fan of most hot punches, glögg/Glühwein are about all I can take, so I would serve this cold. The other benefit is once it’s chilled you can pour it into your holiday punch bowl, surely you have one, and yours might not be heatproof.
Here’s to a Happy 2023! Cheers!
Man, I would eat all of that. Not the punch, because I’m a teetotaler, but I would especially chow down on Matthew’s spicy sausage balls.
I apologize if that comes across as off-colour, Matthew, but you left me an opening. So to speak.
You are more than welcome to chow down on my spicy sausage balls, and it would be on the up-and-up, because even if you left Mrs. Vuoto behind, I would have Better Half and Faithful Hound watching our every move. Especially the Faithful Hound, who doesn’t beg but watches everything that goes into everyone’s mouth with the intensity of a North Korean conscript forced to keep an eye out on doings across the DMZ. Because I’m the Good Cop who can’t stand to discipline Faithful Hound he would have one or two of my spicy sausage balls while we were all at it.
I’m a huge fan of all things flambé! Cherries Jubilee, Bananas Foster, flaming Spanish coffee, Saganaki, flaming shots of Sambuca to name a few of my favorite things. Now I really want to hit up a white table cloth old fashioned steak house with waiters in suits or a Greek restaurant.
Remember when steak tartar and Caesar salads used to be prepared table-side? Those were the good old days… I’ve been very privileged to be taken to fancy/old fashioned restaurants by my grandparents.
@HammerZeitgeist
Great Sambuca story from Mark Ruffalo
I have covered Bananas Foster and Cherries Jubilee before!
and
My God. The good old days. A dozen people showing up half unexpectedly, Better Half faux-moping around playing bartender, me woozily taking a match to food we would be eating just moments later…
Forget Gertrude Stein’s salon, if I could travel back in time for a night, I would attend one of your parties.
Me too, and I instigated and lived through all of them. A couple of them I just barely lived through, but those hazy details are immaterial. I’m still here.
I’m not allowed near open flame.
The punch looks great, but dangerous. I’d love to see a good NA punch recipe sometime to avoid being blitzed at that New Years Eve party by 10:32. They tend to be grossly sweet, like equal parts Hawaiian Punch and 7 Up with frozen concentrate pineapple juice for some extra sugar.
Baptist Church punch was what one of my grad school friends made (before she added a bottle of vodka to it).
I don’t know the specific amounts as I was already drunk when I asked her what was in it, but it was white grape juice, ginger ale or sparkling water, and scoops of orange sherbet.
Scoops, how restrained! I’ve only seen it with the whole tub being used as a big ‘ice’ block!
Did I ever tell you about the Baptist wedding I went to in Maryland? I was very young, a dewy-eyed rising college sophomore, and my boyfriend insisted we go. Not only did my older boyfriend used to sleep with the groom, but his (the groom’s) father was the minister, and they met as children because my boyfriend’s dead father was also a minister, but not Baptist, Episcopalian, where is this going?
The groom made Paul Lynde look like John Wayne but (I learned later) the bride and groom were best friends, the bride knew all about the groom and they had a “special relationship,” and the groom was under intense pressure to get married so she was like, “Fine, I’ll fucking marry you to stop your mother implying that I’m some kind of Jezebel opening my lady bits to one and all.”
So fine, we drove to rural Maryland, the “church” was this very historic shack of some local significance, no a/c of course in the buggy, muggy swamp, my then-boyfriend kept low-key humming the theme from Deliverance, and when it was over there was a reception. Right there, in the shack/church.
My boyfriend and I raced to the punch bowls for some kind of sweet relief and the nice Baptist church lady serving as our hostess said, “This is the usual punch but you have to be careful with this one, it’s got quite a kick to it!”
“Really? Give me two helpings of that. What’s in it?” I was assuming she was going to say vodka or, since we were below the Mason-Dixon Line, bourbon or moonshine or whatever, and she leaned in and said, “It’s got some RC Cola in it, so it elevates the heart rate.”
Worst. Wedding. Reception. Ever. And I’ve been to over 100.
You can make non-alcoholic tea-based ones that are pretty tasty. A friend of mine makes one because her boyfriend of the last 20 years has been in recovery for 30 years (he’s also the vegetarian, and my friend goes along with that too, so 20 years ago I had to start reading labels on canned vegetable stock and be on the lookout for deceptively labeled gelatin-additives, pain in the ass and surprisingly difficult to avoid, so hats off to practicing vegetarians and especially the vegans)—where was I? Oh yes, I could have stopped with “non-alcoholic tea-based winter punches.”