TAKE IT EASY ON NEW YEAR'S EVE

Make Diana Henry’s laid-back menu to bring in the new year

- Diana Henry’s

New Year’s Eve is one of the most difficult gigs to cater. The whole evening is geared towards inducing euphoria, although a sigh of gratitude that we can now all go to bed, or at least get on with watching Jools Holland, is the most you can muster if you’re over 40. No meal is really up to that task. I’ve done the whole edible-gold-leaf-in sauternes-jellies thing, and spent days preparing lavish meals (most of them during the 1990s), but I’ve given all that up now. Even if you go casual, you can end up in the kitchen resentfully cooking on your own. There was a memorable pizza party (the pizzas were homemade, of course) for friends and their children that I just couldn’t pull off, despite having a double oven. Those who ate the first pizzas were still hungry for more when the fourth lot were going into the oven. I wanted to cry. Pizzas from M&S would have been difficult enough to juggle, but doing your own without a pizza oven (those things cook pizzas in seconds) was sheer stupidity.

My New Year’s Eve Chinese-inspired dinner – also attended by children – was another epic fail. A meal that requires you to make lots of dishes doesn’t get off the starting block. The low point of the night was watching the kids – aged between seven and 11 – picking up pork meatballs with chopsticks and firing them at each other. That was when I decided ‘no more’. Since then, I’ve cooked more doable dishes – Marcella Hazan’s slow-cooked leg of lamb with juniper berries was perfect, as all I had to do was keep turning the joint over in its pot. But this year, I don’t want to do anything at the last minute.