New Year’s Eve At Home

New Year’s Eve At Home: have an appetizer party on New Years with family, friends, kids, or adults. Everyone cooks and scores each other.

It’s almost New Year’s Eve and this year we’re celebrating at home. In fact we’ve had a version of this party for the last couple of years and it’s especially perfect for this year. We are celebrating with a New Year’s Eve appetizer competition!

What’s better than enjoying all our favourite appetizers on New Year’s Eve? And we’re not talking about frozen ones from the supermarket either… we’ve taken it up a notch and turned it into a fun family competition!

A Little Friendly Competition

Our kids are teenagers and like cooking so they’ve enjoyed joining the fun, but if you had younger kids who needed more help you could point them towards a no-cook option, or form teams with an adult. Last year my sister and brother-in-law joined us and took the competition up a notch!

New Year’s Eve Decor

I set up the kitchen table for our tasting and scoring. I created this easy and beautiful New Year’s Eve centre piece with lots of mirrored disco balls. These have been collected over the years, but they were mostly from the dollar store. I layered the disco balls on a simple runner and added in some gold mercy glass tea light holders for a little more sparkle.

I designed a beautiful printable set for this party that you can purchase here as an instant download and print on your home computer. It includes a fun “Happy New Year” banner with the year as well.

I picked up some balloons for a fun touch too. I also did a collection of clocks. I picked up some at thrift stores, and the alarm clocks are mostly from antique stores.

The printable set also includes some straw flags you can add to your paper straws for a festive touch.

It won’t be New Year’s Eve without some bubbly!

The set includes printable labels for all your appetizers, score cards, and fun picks you can use for any of the food to dress it up.

Choosing The Appetizers

We encouraged everyone to think of their very favourite restaurant appetizer -or for us who love cruising we were channeling our favourite cruise formal dining room appetizers. We all did our own research, and found recipes. Some of our crew went with tried and true favourites, and some brave ones tried new recipes. Our guests brought their ingredients with them. Around 5 or so we all got in the kitchen together, put some tunes on, poured some fancy drinks and got cooking together.

Everyone set up their appetizer on the table and used one of our appetizer place cards from the printable set to label their dish. Each place card had a number on it so it was easy to keep track of scoring.

When it was time to taste test everyone helped themselves, scoring as they went.

For our appetizers we choose this portabella mushroom and feta pizza -find the recipe here.

We also made stuffed mushrooms -find the recipe here.

Another dish we made was caramelized onion and goat’s cheese tarts. Find our recipe here.

We also made homemade honey garlic chicken wings, and I’ll be sharing the easy recipe tomorrow.

Scoring The Appetizers

When it was time for scoring and dinner, we used these printable score cards to give everyone’s appetizer a score out of 5. Afterward we tallied up the scores for a winner.

You might want to include a prize for the winner. Something like a gift card, or a bottle of something special would be fun. We went for bragging rights.

More Ideas

Depending on the number of people at your party, you might want to supplement the meal. Last year we had 6 main appetizers and that was perfect for a fun dinner. If you had less, you might want to also add in a charcuterie and cheese board for additional nibbling, or to enjoy while you’re cooking together.

You could also do a dessert round at midnight for a fun addition, where everyone makes a small version of their favourite sweet as well, and you all taste and score this course as well. You could even ask everyone to add a drink pairing to all the appetizers, alcoholic or non-alcoholic. And depending on your group, you could dress up in fancy attire, or have a pj party. It’s such a fun party idea that you can adjust depending on the group of family, friends, kids or adults.

During our evening between cooking and nibbling we also had a movie marathon going on. Pick a series, a theme, or a favourite actor and watch them all that night. One year we did Jane Austen movies, last year it was the God Father, we also had Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, and Narnia in the running. A game board tournament might be a fun option as well.