Making a menu for the New Year is a difficult and troublesome business, because you need not only to fit into the budget, satisfy the tastes of guests, but also to appease the symbol of the coming year. The recipes below can already make up a complete feast. Simple and affordable products are used for their preparation, while the end result is a beautiful and mouth-watering treat.
In our menu:
- How to treat the symbol of the year - the Rat?;
- Pork in honey glaze;
- Potato garnish "Petals";
- New Year's wreath salad;
- Cheese appetizer "Mandarins";
- Seafood tartlets;
- Caramel pears in wine;
- Tangerine cake;
- Mulled wine.
- How to calculate the products for the New Year's table?
What to cook for the Year of the White Metal Rat?
Meeting the coming year of the Rat is a great occasion to show all your culinary imagination, since this rodent is a great glutton, not whimsical and omnivorous. Meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, cheeses, sweets and pastries - there is nothing that the hostess of the coming 2020 would refuse.
The rat loves simple food, so it will be pleased with a plentiful table of various dishes, but without exotic excesses that will be inappropriate and unnecessary.
This animal is omnivorous and it is distinguished from predators only by the absence of fangs, so you should definitely cook meat for hot. You can choose pork, beef, lamb or chicken, but it's better not to bother with chops, but cook the meat in a whole piece.
As for the side dish, as this dish you can choose not only the usual potatoes, but also various cereals (lentils, buckwheat, rice). If the family finds it difficult to perceive porridge as a festive treat, you can opt for new potato dishes, but without complicating the cooking process too much.
All kinds of salads and snacks will bring the desired variety to the table. Since the symbol of the year loves products that give a feeling of fullness for a long time. Such energy and high-calorie "bombs", so it is good to use cheeses and nuts for salads and snacks.
The rat is not indifferent to sweets, in this regard, a dessert on the New Year's table is a must. This can be a fruit treat or homemade baked goods. For such dishes, it is imperative to use spices and nuts, which will become the key to the benevolence and patronage of the symbol of the year.
For all its omnivorousness and inconsistency, the rodent does not particularly like strong alcoholic drinks, so it is better to give preference to traditional champagne, wine, liqueurs, mulled wine or other low-alcohol drinks and cocktails.
Pork in honey glaze
Since chicken is often one of the ingredients in most salads, so as not to be repeated, pork can be cooked as hot in an appetizing honey glaze.
List of required ingredients for this dish:
- 2-2.5 kg of pork ham;
- 200 ml of honey;
- 60 ml dark corn syrup;
- 40 ml orange juice;
- 80 ml melted butter;
- 50-70 g of clove buds.
Step by step cooking:
- As with any meat, the ham must first be washed and then patted dry with paper towels. Next, with a sharp knife, a mesh of intersecting shallow cuts should be made along the meat surface. Insert a carnation bud into the center of each cell or at the intersection of the cuts.
- Line a baking dish with foil and place the meat in it with the fat side up. Bake at 160 degrees for a total of about 3-3.5 hours. After half of the indicated time, turn the ham over to the other side.
- Combine all other products in a saucepan with a thick bottom and put on fire.Bring the icing to a boil, stirring constantly and simmer for one minute.
- Half an hour before the end of cooking, remove the meat from the oven and pour the icing on top, which should not be consumed all at once. Next, cook the ham under the same temperature conditions, but pour the glaze on top every 10 minutes.
- Remove the cooked meat from the oven and let it stand for a while before serving. Serve the remaining glaze with the ham as a sauce.
Potato garnish "Petals"
Potatoes are a constant favorite among the side dishes on the New Year's menu, but most housewives prefer to make puree out of them. But you can, after spending about the same amount of time for cooking, serve a beautiful potato rose on the table. For a spectacular potato side dish you will need:
- 2000 g potato tubers;
- 40 ml melted butter;
- 40 ml of vegetable (olive or sunflower) oil;
- 10-15 g of garlic;
- rosemary, salt and spices to taste.
Progress:
- Peel potatoes of approximately the same size and regular oval shape, and then grate on a special grater or cut into slices 1-1.5 mm thick.
- Mix both types of oil. Lubricate the baking dish from the inside with this mixture using a silicone brush, but do not use all the oil at once.
- Next, lay out the potato petals beautifully in a form in the form of a blossoming rose. Sprinkle with salt, spices, chopped garlic and rosemary on top.
- Drizzle with the remaining oil and send to the oven to bake at 200 degrees. Cooking time will depend on the size and thickness of the potato layer. On average, it will take from 45 minutes to 1.5 hours.
This garnish can be served in portions by collecting several "roses" in small tins according to the number of guests.
New Year's wreath salad
The New Year's menu is impossible without various salads. Most recently, Olivier and Herring under a fur coat remained the undisputed favorites, but now more and more housewives prefer to experiment with different tastes and pay more attention to the design of snacks. Such a dish-decoration of the New Year's table will be a salad made from:
- 250 g of boiled potatoes in their skins;
- 200 g pickled cucumbers;
- 170 g boiled chicken fillet;
- 3 hard-boiled eggs;
- 50 g red salad onions;
- 150-200 g of mayonnaise.
Additionally, for decoration you will need:
- ½ small pomegranate (grain);
- 1 boiled carrot;
- 40-50 g fresh dill.
Priority of actions:
- Disassemble the boiled chicken fillet into separate fibers. Grate the potatoes and eggs on a coarse grater, and chop the cucumbers and onions into small cubes.
- Place a glass in the center of a flat serving dish, lay potatoes, chicken, cucumbers with onions and eggs around it in layers. Grease each new layer of ingredients with mayonnaise.
- Carefully trim the salad around the glass and coat with mayonnaise on all sides. Then carefully remove the glass and you can start decorating. Place dill sprigs on a snack, imitating a coniferous wreath. Cut out circles and stars from carrots, which, together with pomegranate seeds, decorate the wreath.
Cheese appetizer "Mandarins"
What a New Year without tangerines, and the Year of the Rat without a cheese snack. All this goes well in a dish made from:
- 200 g of processed cheese;
- 12 g garlic;
- 14 g mayonnaise;
- 50-70 g pitted olives;
- 25-30 g ground paprika;
- basil or oregano leaves for decoration.
Cooking method:
- Grate the melted cheese on a fine grater. To make this easier, you need to put it in the freezer for half an hour. Add garlic and mayonnaise squeezed through a press to the cheese. Putting more mayonnaise than indicated in the recipe is not necessary, the balls must keep their shape.
- Gather the cheese mass with a teaspoon and shape it around the olives in the form of a tangerine ball. After that, gently roll the blanks in ground paprika. Using a toothpick, make punctures in the cheese balls, into which you insert the leaves of spicy herbs.
Before serving, the appetizer should be refrigerated for half an hour, and instead of olives, you can use cherry tomatoes or dried apricots.
Tartlets with seafood for the New Year
Tartlet snacks are becoming more and more popular. They look more advantageous at a festive feast than the usual sandwiches, and they are not more complicated to prepare. To prepare seafood tartlets, you need to prepare:
- 10 pieces. ready-made tartlets;
- 400 g squid;
- 150 g shrimp;
- 150 g crab sticks;
- 100 g of red caviar;
- 3 chicken eggs;
- 60 g mayonnaise.
How to cook:
- Boil shrimp and squid until tender, cool and cut into small cubes. Hard-boiled eggs, peel and chop into cubes with crab sticks.
- Mix all chopped products, add caviar and mayonnaise to them. Stuff the tartlets with the resulting mass, which then decorate with herbs and hearts from two shrimp tails and red caviar.
New Year's dessert "Caramelized pears in wine"
What a feast without dessert. On New Year's Eve, a fruit dessert with spicy aromas of spices and a refreshing scoop of vanilla ice cream will cope with this role. For caramelized pears in wine you will need:
- 6 pcs. medium winter pears;
- 750 ml of red wine;
- 100 g sugar;
- ½ lemon;
- ¼ orange;
- 4-6 carnation buds;
- 4-6 peas of black pepper;
- 3 g cinnamon;
- 4 g coriander;
- vanilla ice cream for serving.
Sequencing:
- Peel the pears, peeling them off as thin as possible. The tail should be left, and a small part of the fruit should be cut from the bottom for stability.
- Boil red wine in a saucepan, add lemon and orange slices, sugar and spices to it. Let it simmer for a couple of minutes.
- Dip the prepared pears into the wine with spices and blanch them until soft. Depending on the variety and size of the fruit, this can take from 30 minutes to an hour and a half.
- Remove the finished pears from the wine with a slotted spoon and cool. Boil the remaining wine to a sauce consistency.
- Serve the dessert on a plate drizzled with a little sauce, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
To make the wine sauce thicken faster, you do not need to boil it down, but add a small amount of starch. You can take other spices for dessert, for example, star anise and vanilla.
Tangerine cake
In addition to a light fruit dessert, you can bake a delicious tangerine cake for the New Year, soft with an amazing citrus taste and aroma.
For cakes you will need:
- 4 eggs;
- 190 g sugar;
- 130 g flour;
- 7 g baking powder;
- 1 g vanillin;
- 60 ml of vegetable oil;
- 60 ml of boiling water.
The cake layer will be tangerine jam and mascarpone-based cheese cream, which will require:
- 300 g of tangerines;
- 100 g sugar;
- 200 g mascarpone;
- 100 g soft butter;
- 100 g icing sugar;
- 1 g vanillin.
To decorate the cake you will need:
- 100 g of tangerines;
- 50 g dark chocolate;
- 50 g walnuts;
- 50 g minced almonds.
Bakery products:
- Beat eggs at room temperature with sugar on high speed for 5 minutes, then gently add a mixture of flour, vanillin and baking powder into them. Then pour in vegetable oil and boiling water, beat for another five minutes using a mixer.
- Line a detachable form with a diameter of 20 cm with parchment, transfer the dough into it and bake a biscuit in a preheated oven at 180 degrees until a dry toothpick (35-40 minutes).
- Wrap the cooled crust with cling film and keep in the refrigerator for 10-12 hours, then dissolve it into 4 layers of the same thickness using a saw-knife or fishing line.
- Peel and seed tangerines for jam, beat with a blender until smooth, mix with sugar and boil until thick (about a quarter of an hour after boiling).
- For the cream, beat the cream cheese, softened butter and powdered sugar with a mixer into a fluffy homogeneous mass.
- Prepare an impregnation from water or tangerine syrup and sugar, with which to coat all the cakes.Then grease the first cake with cream, lay the second, on which put tangerine jam, then the third and fourth layers sandwiched with cream.
- Coat the assembled cake with cream on top and sides, decorate with melted chocolate, tangerine slices and nuts, as shown in the photo. The finished dessert must be allowed to stand in the refrigerator for a couple of hours.
Mulled wine for New Year's Eve
Women and men, young people and older people prefer to celebrate the New Year with a glass of champagne in hand. Perhaps, after the desire made for the chimes battle, someone will prefer to change the drink for something stronger or a light alcoholic cocktail, but if the company plans to join the New Year's street festivities, it will not be superfluous to take a thermos with fragrant mulled wine with you. It will warm you up and will not let your mood decrease.
List of required ingredients:
- 750 ml of red wine;
- 2 apples;
- 1 orange;
- 2 star anise stars;
- 2 carnation buds;
- 2 cinnamon sticks;
- 2-4 grams of ginger root;
- honey to taste.
How to prepare a drink:
- Wash the apples and cut into thin slices. Cut the citrus fruit in half. Squeeze juice from one half, and chop the other into thin circles. Turn the ginger root into thin plates or grate.
- Pour wine and juice into a saucepan of suitable capacity, add chopped fruits and spices. Bring everything to a boil, boil for 5-10 minutes, then turn off the heat and add honey.
You can use brown cane sugar or regular sugar instead of honey. In this case, the sweetener can be added directly to the boiling wine.
How to correctly calculate the products for the menu?
When the dishes for the future feast are selected, you can go shopping in the store, but before that you should adjust the New Year's menu, paying attention to the following points:
- if there are more men in the company, then drinks should be stronger and more satisfying dishes; for women, it is better to focus on light and varied snacks;
- if there are more older people among the invited, then it is better not to be creative either with a combination of products or with their presentation, such a company likes tradition;
- New Year is a winter holiday, and in the cold season, people tend to eat hearty and high-calorie foods, so it is imperative to prepare meat dishes;
- when calculating the number of products to be purchased, it should be borne in mind that for a six-hour feast, each guest eats about 1 kg of various dishes.
- when going shopping, be sure to make a grocery list. It will save you time and money.
The above menu can be used as a basis, supplementing it with your favorite dishes (salads or appetizers) or replacing some of them with those that you prefer homemade. May the meeting of the New Year 2020 be delicious and joyful!
