NYE Party Food on a Budget

After indulging over the Christmas period and spending all of December’s pay packet on presents, New Year’s Eve is the welcome opportunity for people to squeeze into their finery and splash cash on overpriced prosecco in a crowded, sweaty club full of strangers, spending the first few minutes of the new year pondering the meaning of the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne – what do they mean?!

As that doesn’t actually sound like a welcome prospect at all, we propose that you stay in this NYE – staying in is the new going out, don’t you know?

via GIPHY

The start of January is all about doing away with the old, and by that we mean doing away with those bits of leftover Christmas food once and for all. By using up your last remaining festive bits and bobs, you’ll save money on your NYE and make sure you’ve got plenty of tasty grub for your guests. There’s nothing worse than going to a fancy do only to find the only food on offer is canapes *tummy rumbles*.

Making your own also means you can be in control of how healthy everything is too, so you can start off the new year being as good or bad as you’re comfortable with. Here’s a few ideas to get your spectacular NYE buffet off to a smashing start:

There are only so many turkey pies, stir fries and curries a person can eat. One of each is probably the upper limit, realistically. And if you made the classic mistake of buying a turkey that feeds 36 when there’s just two of you, you will still be working your way through it by New Year’s Eve.

So we propose doing what all good party hosts would do – palm it off on your guests. We’re not suggesting that you just serve them plates of dry meat, unless you want them to leave before midnight. Instead, we suggest that you cut up your turkey into really small pieces, combine it with herbs, spices and some curry paste and make red Thai curry-inspired turkey meatballs, just like Girl and the Kitchen.

These are tasty, spicy, meaty, juicy and use ingredients you’ve probably already got in your store cupboard – perfect finger food for your NYE buffet!

Here’s another recipe for lingering bits of turkey. If you serve this up as well as the meatballs, it won’t feel like turkey overload for your guests, as these dishes taste totally different.

Satay sauce is another one that primarily uses store cupboard ingredients, including lime juice, peanut butter, soy sauce and sesame oil. Katrina Coming Clean has an easy-to-follow recipe for turkey satay skewers that you could serve up as tasty chunks of meat on their own, or you could add slices of pepper, onion and even leftover lime to jazz them up.

A buffet is not complete without a scotch egg – that’s written in the Magna Carta, that is – and they don’t have to come from a packet. Making your own is actually pretty simple and means you can use up all of those fancy sausages you bought at the Christmas markets that are beginning to get a little past their best.

The Pink Whisk has a great recipe for homemade pork and apple scotch eggs. Leave the hard-boiled eggs whole for large ones or crumble up pieces of egg to make mini ones – ‘it’s your party and you can serve scotch eggs of any size you want to’, as Leslie Gore should have sang.

Once you’ve had the compulsory turkey stir fry, there’s not too much more that you can do with your leftover Christmas dinner veg. The week between Christmas and New Year is meant for indulging in chocolate, mince pies and Bailey’s, not bits of leftover carrots and sprouts.

But cooking up unused veg and shredding it or slicing it finely and turning it into vegetable bhajis is an excellent option. Skint Dad’s recipe for onion bhajis can easily be adapted to include different types of veg, so whether you’ve got carrots, parsnips, sprouts or potatoes kicking around, turn them into bhajis. Add whatever kind of curry powder you’ve got in the cupboard, and that’s a tasty snack that takes all of those sprouts off your hands.

Every good buffet table needs a few classic staples too – you can’t go wrong with sausages on sticks or cheese and pineapple or mini pickles on sticks. Buying some readymade pastry cases and filling them with a simple spinach and ricotta mix or some cream cheese and smoked salmon is another quick fix to pad out your buffet table too. Stuffed peppers are another good option and a nice winter warmer for after you’ve been outside to let out the old year and welcome in the new. Fill them with spicy chorizo for the meat eaters and spiced lentils for any veggies.

Naturally, having people over for NYE means you can serve them some of your leftover Christmas alcohol, but why not use some in your cooking too? Alcoholic brownies are gorgeous and the booze helps to really bring out the flavour of the chocolate. You could use rum, Bailey’s or take inspiration from the Pudding Lane Blog and whip up a batch of mulled wine brownies.

You could follow suit and use a stencil to dust a ‘Happy New Year’ message in icing over your finished brownies, or you could get out the edible spray glitter to add a real show-stopping sparkle to your NYE dessert.

By staying in on New Year’s Eve, you can save money, know you won’t spend the evening squashed against sweaty strangers and you can be guaranteed plenty to eat – we just can’t guarantee that you still won’t spend the first few minutes of the new year wondering what on earth Auld Lang Syne actually means.