betinm An Easy (and Less Expensive) Way to Ring in the New Year With Caviar

Happy New Year’s Eve eve to you all! Do you have your tomorrow-night plans all sorted out? We usually like to stay home, watch an old classic movie and then shimmy into bed right after the countdown. But there have been more effervescent years with friends and noisemakers, Champagne and caviar.

If you’re going the caviar route, Eric Kim has a great new recipe for you, and you don’t have to splurge on the expensive stuff. His brilliant tobiko pasta is like a cross between sushi and a bowl of creamy Alfredo, with the briny flavor of the flying-fish roe brightening the richness of the cream cheese and Cheddar in the sauce. It comes together quickly and goes marvelously well with a glass of anything bubbly, especially sparkling sake.

Featured Recipe

View Recipe →

Following a similar creamy-pasta-with-seafood path, Ham El-Waylly’s lobster mac and cheese is about as deluxe as mac and cheese gets. He starts with whole, live lobsters so he can use their shells and head to add a complex, oceanic intensity to the sauce. To get the best textures — no rubbery, overcooked lobster here — Ham cooks the lobster, pasta and cheese sauce separately and then combines them at the last minute, running everything under the broiler to crisp the top just before serving. It’s a perfect party dish.

If you’re looking for a savory little morsel well suited to nibbling with a festive beverage, Hetty “Roll With It” Lui McKinnon’s vegetarian sausage rolls might be just the thing. These get a deeply meaty flavor from mushrooms seasoned with miso, and they’re buttery and flaky, too, from the puff pastry. They do take some effort, but these burnished, brawny little bites are absolutely worth it. (Pulsing the mushrooms in a food processor instead of chopping them by hand will save you some knife work and time.)

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Mr. Biden even held on to hope for the transformative peace deal for the Middle East that he thought was within grasp a year agobetinm, believing it could survive even as the war between Hamas and Israel tore at its foundations.