Party Snacks – FoodWatcher

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/davecampbell/foodwatcher.com/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php on line 2022

chicken liver pâté

I started hosting Passover seder four years ago. My dad had just passed away and my mother, who usually hosts, appreciated the relief. I don’t usually host holidays — well, they let me have Hanukkah — because our space is so small and the traffic, so terrible, but I must have done too good of a job because I haven’t stopped since. This means I have a secret archive of Passover recipes I’ve been keeping from you, and it’s rather rude. Here is one.

deviled eggs

I will never find it again [please send me a link if see the original], but a few weeks ago a TikTok* went through my feed in which a woman is invited to eat half a dozen eggs and she says “Oh no, that’s too much.” “But what if I scoop them out, mash it with mayo, and stuff it back together?” “Thanks, I’ll have the whole tray!”

I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the intended effect, but I’ve been craving deviled eggs since. I know we often think of them as a holiday party food, so this might make little sense, but I absolutely love them in the summer, especially when it’s too hot to cook anything real and I only want to eat, like, two cold salads and a handful of potato chips for dinner. Deviled eggs — basically egg salad with less gloop (my food writing chops are legendary, I know) — are the perfect piece to round out the meal. I like to keep hard-boiled eggs in the fridge anyway, so it’s just a matter of peeling, popping out the centers (why is this so fun), mashing them up, and spooning them back in.

baked brie with balsamic red onions

Despite my deep affection for cheese, to the point that one of my favorite things to do on a New York City weekend is to dip into Murray’s and treat us to something crumbly or aged or rich and runny, I don’t love cheese plates. It feels really good to get this off my chest. At first, it was just a budget issue; I still feel the sticker shock from the first time I tried to put together one of those cute boards with five or six different wedges on them, plus the crackers, breads, pickles, dried fruit, toasted almonds, olives, cured meats, and all of the other minimum requirements of our latter-day horns of plenty. But I was also put off by the waste. Even though so much went unfinished, the leftovers were unsalvageable, as fingers, forks, knives, and crumbs got into everything (a particularly shuddering thought in the age of Covid). Instead, when people come over, or what I remember of it, I prefer to focus on one or two decadent, attention-grabbing things and nothing grabs attention on a cold winter day like warm, runny cheese.

Baked brie was all the entertaining rage in the 1970s and 80s. Nothing was more glamorous but accessible, an imported cheese that everyone knew and could pronounce. But as Americans got more sophisticated about imported cheese — manchego! Humboldt Fog! — in a crushing fall from grace, brie became the opposite of chic. And this is where my interest piqued — dated and unhip, you say? Where can I sign up?

cider-glazed bacon-wrapped dates

Let me state for the record that I am usually opposed to sharing non-recipes like this. Thus, whenever I’ve mentioned bacon-wrapped dates as part of a party or Friendsgiving menu and have received a surge of comments and DMs asking me for the recipe, I’ve responded, “Just Google it — recipes abound!” Or, more huffily, “That’s it. That’s the recipe.” But I’ve begun to question why I want to send your beautiful faces elsewhere, especially because when you do Google for a recipe, it’s going to lead you to what I consider inadvisable places. And now, like clockwork, here come Opinions:

Before wrapping pitted dates in bacon, I’ve, on the advice of countless glossy food magazines, stuffed almonds and/or pistachios inside the dates. I have filled them with blue cheese, goat cheese, and, truly the worst, fiddly matchsticks of aged manchego and if I could, I’d take every one of those minutes of my life back because forgive me for making us sound like a bunch of savages here, but I can barely taste them in the end, but they increase the amount of time it takes to put together what should be the simplest party trick up your sleeve threefold.
Read more »