Alsatian flatbread.

Friends, I’m wishing you all the best for a safe and healthy New Year. I hope you get to spend NYE with people you love and lots of good nibbles and cheer by your side as you count down to 2025 🎉🎉🎉🎉

Below you will find a few of my favorite New Year’s Eve foods, from this homemade ranch dip and Ina’s baked fontina, both of which I love with pickled crudité on the side. It’s never a bad idea to make some crostini. And a big pot of soup. Vermont Cheddar Cheese sounds right. Finally, nothing is simpler or more festive than this tangerine spritz!

The post is organized as follows:

Drinks

Two glasses of a Tangerine spritz.

Tangerine Spritz: from David Lebovitz’s Drinking French, this is my latest, favorite discovery. It’s like a spritz meets mimosa, and I find it so festive and refreshing, perfect for ringing in the New Year.

Here are two other ideas:

How to Make Crostini

crostini just baked

If you’re thinking about making some sort of dip this New Year’s Eve, you may want to make a batch of crostini. For its short height — which translates to a short width in crostini form — focaccia is a great bread to use. Here are two easy recipes (this one and this one). Of course, you can use any bread to make crostini. My mother’s peasant bread works well, too. Here’s what you do:

  1. Heat your oven to 450ºF.
  2. Slice your bread 1/4 to 1/2-inch thick. Transfer to a sheet pan.
  3. Drizzle lightly with olive oil. Season lightly with sea salt.
  4. Transfer pan to the oven and toast for 7 to 10 minutes or until golden.

Dips

Cheesy Goodness

Baked Camembert

Several years ago, I was flipping through my Martha Stewart Hors D’oeuvres Handbook and landed on the baked camembert recipe. It’s so simple it feels like cheating but it’s kind of delicious, and if you are pressed for time, it takes no effort.

You need:

  • One 8-ounce round Camembert cheese, in its wooden container, any paper labels from the front or sides removed

Here’s what you do:

  1. Heat oven to 375ºF.
  2. Unwrap the cheese and return it to its box, discarding the wrapping.
  3. Return the lid to the box and place the box on a sheet pan.
  4. Bake until the cheese is completely soft on the inside, about 20 minutes.
  5. Transfer to a work surface, and, if you wish, use a serrated knife to slice off the top rind of the cheese.
  6. Serve with crostini or crackers or bread.

Nibbles

Bready Bites

Alsatian flatbread.

Many years ago while working for a Philadelphia catering company, we served an Alsatian flatbread topped with gorgonzola and pears at nearly every holiday party, and it never failed to be the unanimous favorite.

The process is simple: peel and thinly slice a few pears; then gently sauté them in butter. Meanwhile, melt blue cheese with a little cream; then spread it in a thin, even layer over pizza dough. Top with the sautéed pears; then bake until golden.

This is s perfect, wintry hors d’oeuvre but served aside a salad, I’d call it dinner. I wrote about this for Baking Steel several years ago. Find the recipe there.