Tag: Caviar

New Year’s Eve buffet

Our New Year’s Eve tradition for a while now has been to put together a buffet of assorted small bites – meats and cheeses, fruit, olives, sweets, and such – plus champagne or prosecco.

Caviar is sometimes part of the feast as well. Usually we cheap out and buy the inexpensive whitefish caviar that you can find at Whole Foods, or even sometimes at a “normal” supermarket. This year, I decided we deserved a little splurge, so I ordered a very small tin of very good caviar from a company I found online. Not the most expensive stuff on offer, but still about a hundred bucks for a 1.75-ounce tin. For a once-a-year treat, that didn’t seem unreasonable. And it did indeed turn out to be an improvement over the supermarket variety. The flavor is a lot more subtle, and the texture a lot silkier. We don’t always finish the jar of the whitefish caviar, but we ate every last little egg in this tin.

As I mentioned previously, there was enough cheese left over from our last visit to The Cheese Shop of Salem to cover New Year’s Eve as well, plus my brother and his wife gave us a Christmas gift of a new cheese board plus some cheese and crackeds to go with. So the cheese tray consisted of Garrotxa, Shropshire blue, Brabander, Port Salut, Kerrygold Dubliner (an Irish take on Cheddar), some herbed goat cheese, and also some pimento cheese spread my wife likes. We also had some left over Wagyu bresaola, cornichons, olives, and pickled red onion.

Rounding out the savory selection was shrimp with cocktail sauce. For fruit we had mandarin oranges and grapes. The sweets included some chocolate-covered almonds, “Katzenzungen” (“kitten tongue”) chocolates, Lindt milk chocolate balls, torrone, and some Walker’s shortbread.

Yes, you’re right, that IS a lot of food for three people, and we came nowhere near finishing all of it.