Usually, the entire holiday season from Thanksgiving Day through Christmas and even New Year's Day is a time for great food, great drink, and lots of get-togethers. Here are five great snack foods that are absolutely fantastic to have around during the holidays.
Dates:
Pitted or unpitted, dates are healthy little sugar bombs that are hard to resist and seem to come in every dried-fruit sampler in the entire catalog of holidays-themed dried-fruit gift-boxes, which make pretty great gifts. Sometimes they're pitted and stuffed with walnuts, which makes both the taste and nutrition even better. These are available for decent prices at grocery stores everywhere, so you don't even have to make a special order to get them. Because of their sweetness, dates are hard to pair with drinks, making wines taste a bit flat, beers sour or bitter, and mixed drinks lusterless. Like everything else, champagne can stand up to them, as can cocktails that don't depend on sweetness to make their way across the palate. On the other hand, they pair surprisingly well with a little spiked egg nog.
Mixed Nuts:
Almost everyone likes mixed nuts, particulary the roasted and salted kind, and they're a perfect thing to have around during the holidays, particularly when folks are coming and going for Christmas parties and gift sharing. When the time is more intimate, for a different, more old-world experience, break out the nutcracker and get fresh nuts still in their shells -- this is the (botanical) season for them, after all. Many great Yuletide conversations are had over a bowl of nuts to crack, particularly by a nice fire and especially when there's a lovely dinner with drinks to follow. Freshly shelled nuts are great with dark beers and perfect for the season.
Gourmet Peanuts:
I included these separately from "mixed nuts" because the experience is completely different. These, however, are incredible. While dry roasted peanuts, a la Planters, e.g., are good, those from The Peanut Roaster, located in North Carolina and available by mail-order, are incredible! Their jalapeno and hot-honeys flavors are particularly great anytime, but particularly around the holidays when everyone wants a snack. They also have a wide selection of other flavors, including pesto and sun-dried tomato ranch, other nuts, and chocolate covered nuts. For gift ideas, they even have an option to have some of their nuts packaged in collegiate-team logo wrappers. Peanuts, of course, go very well with just about any kind of beer you want to drink them with.
Fruit (white) Stilton:
A lot of folks know about the English cheese Stilton as a blue cheese, but they also produce some wonderful, crumbly, delicious fruit varieties. In particular, if you can get your hands on it (available frequently at the Fresh Market stores, at least in Knoxville), the mango and ginger Stilton is as near cheese perfection as there can be. It's rich, it cumbles like blue cheese, it's creamy and sweet with a hint of salt, and the fruit presents a dead-on perfect balance in the rich cheese. It's hard to keep yourself from eating way too much of this stuff. It's a bit expensive, but it's far better than the usual nut-covered cheese ball. This plays brilliantly with wine, red or white, as long as it's assertive enough to cut through the richness of the cheese and stand up to the fruitiness at the same time. It also is, of course, absolutely a delight with a glass of the bubbly.
Pepperoni:
Of all of the dried sausages that could be on your table, and frequently are around the holidays, pepperoni is perhaps the most overlooked of them. It's spicy, almost universally loved, easy to get, and it's absolutely delicious with any kind of crackers, cheese, or little pre-built snacks that you might want to have around. Slicing it thinly, thickly, into sticks, and into chunks each creates a unique flavor-texture experience that keeps it from getting boring or routine, and it doesn't seem to carry that same greasiness that the beef-based sausages tend to. If you have a fruit-forward wine that is very light on the spiciness of the finish, it can pair quite well with pepperoni. If not, get some beer. You can't miss with that!
Buy them locally! Knoxville has some great resources for picking up most of these snacks. Premium-quality snacks of these kinds are available at the Knoxville-area The Fresh Market and Earth Fare stores, which are particularly important for finding the white Stilton cheeses.
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