Our New Year’s Eve Tradition (2025) Part 1

Ever since our son moved out, over twenty years ago, we’ve had a special New Year’s Eve dinner tradition: We cook a special meal together.

Some years we’ve skipped cooking in, to do something outside our home, like a dinner-and-show event, but most years, we pick a theme and create a meal. We’ve done Chinese themed meals, Italian themed meals, plain-old Canadian themed meals (hearty and comforting). But until 2025, we’d never done a French themed meal, so that’s what I decided we’d do.

The men wisely decided that they’d be my sous chefs.

Down from the kitchen bookshelves came the heavy tomes: The erudite and cross-referential La Rouse Gastronomique, Julia Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a copy of an older edition of Bon Appetite’s cookbook that we got as a bonus for our subscription, and of course, the most recent edition of Joy of Cooking. After flipping many pages, comparing recipe versions and creating and editing a menu, I somehow ended up as the head chef.

(Not that either husband or son once uttered “Yes, Chef!” at my command. So disappointing.)

First decision: No question, the soup had to be Julia Child’s version of French Onion Soup Gratinee. It’s a classic that has stood the test of time and even a few “cage matches” on this amusing YouTube channel, worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqQDVzA0uUo.

Now, if it were only my husband and me dining, I might have chosen a chicken liver pâté for one of the appetizers, but our son hates liver. In the Bon Appetite cookbook, there’s a recipe for a pâté made from pureed mushrooms sauteed in butter and nuts that would be perfect. There’s still two-thirds of it left, in the freezer.

Then I got a bee in my bonnet about cheese, and found a recipe, also in the Bon Appetite book, for baked Brie with caramelized onions. But with the onion soup, that would be too much, so I decided to top the Brie with homemade cranberry sauce.

The baked Brie recipe called for a round of Brie in a wooden box, so that’s what I got. The idea is to bake the cheese inside the box consisting of paper-thin wood. Trust me when I say: “Don’t try this at home.”

They must not be making those boxes as sturdy as they did back in the eighties when the cookbook was published. The cheese with cranberries tasted wonderful, the sour and sweet-tart flavors combining on soft rounds from a fresh baguette, but the box decided mid-way to come unhinged and let the cheese flow freeform. There’s a reason why ceramic Brie bakers exist.

A few days before I started the menu project, my son and I went out to dinner at a charming Italian restaurant, and with our aperitifs we ordered warm olives. A small bowl of green and black olives arrived redolent of garlic and rosemary. They were delicious, so I figured I could use up some of the last of the fresh rosemary out on the terrace.

Mixed olives were easy to procure at our usual grocery store olive bar. Instead of trying to mince the garlic, I just put it through the garlic press. Along with minced rosemary, I zested some lemon peel and mixed all three into the olives. Thirty seconds in the microwave oven warmed everything so that the flavors blended perfectly. If you like olives, try doing this. Easy and yummy.

Along with those appetizers, there was homemade duck prosciutto, cured in a mixture of kosher salt, sugar, herbs and spices, (a recipe collected from the internet a few years back). The only real challenge there was slicing the finished product thinly. We took turns until we all gave up and said it was enough.

(A smart cook picks her battles. A smarter cook gets someone else to fight those battles.)

See Part 2 for the rest of my culinary adventures!