The advice from Captain is Obvious, which few people follow. Because he is opposed by the general Tradition. The New Year's table should be filled with plates and cups so that none of the guests would guess what color the tablecloth is. Ideally, the dishes should be complex, fantastic, like the last time.
Naturally, this approach inflates the budget for the feast catastrophically. But you just don't need so much food. To get full and even overeat, one hot with a side dish and several salads and snacks will be enough. Because the stomach on New Year's Eve is exactly the same volume as on other days, no New Year's miracle makes it bottomless. And if a certain amount of food saturates you on a normal Wednesday, it will also be optimal on December 31.
Sometimes people who are wondering about saving are advised to replace products with cheaper ones: take herring spread instead of caviar, and buy cheaper instead of expensive cheese. And that's not the way to do it. Because it's better to have the right amount of delicious food for a meal that you wanted than a full table of compromise dishes.
The menu should be thought out in advance, not only to know what to cook. In the process, you also need to understand how many portions of a particular dish you want and how many products you will need. Doing everything by eye, you can make a mistake: buy not two herring, but three, not 300 grams of cheese, but half a kilo. And it seems that for each product the difference will be insignificant. But in total, the overspending will be significant.
At first glance, this advice contradicts the previous paragraph. But it's about something else. Often in the New Year's menu there are very complex dishes that need to spend a lot of money and time. Because when else, if not today? The answer is simple: any other day.
If there are a lot of unusual dishes on the table, it will not be easy to enjoy the taste of each of them properly. So isn't it better to allocate for something special, for example, a day off, and squeeze the maximum out of food?
In the New Year, it is better to choose something still delicious, but not requiring a culinary feat. Or at least let one dish get the role of a masterpiece.
It looks like an attempt on the sacred, but this is actually the easiest way to save money. Because drinking alcohol in general is not necessary, but drinking a lot of it is harmful and dangerous. So if you spend less on alcohol, the New Year's table will be more budget-friendly with minimal losses.
Agree that everyone carries one or a couple of dishes. But distribute the menu honestly, so that everyone spends money and time about the same, and not so that someone prepares a complex layered salad, and someone prepares sausage sandwiches.
Separately, control what kind of load will fall on the receiving side. Usually, no matter how hard people try to share everything, a party costs more to the owners of the house. Because they gut the family bar when the general alcohol is over, they often do not limit themselves to one dish, but are also spent on home decoration.
Do you know the saying "An expensive egg for Christ's Day"? It means that the value of something grows if it happens or appears on time. But it will be correct to understand it literally: you've seen what happens to egg prices before Easter.
Happy New Year is the same story. Russians have a list of favorite dishes, so it's easy for stores to predict what demand will grow before the holidays. And, accordingly, the price. Therefore, if you plan to buy something expensive and stored for a long time, do it in advance. Of course, this deprives the New Year's menu of spontaneity. But saving in general is largely related to planning, so you have to go for it.
