How to Make a Christmas Antipasti Platter
My favourite light meals are never an exact recipe. They are simply a “dump everything from the top couple of shelves of the fridge and the pantry on the table” meal. Cheese, cooked or cured meat or fish, dips and spreads and sauces, breads and crackers, fruit and veg. It always makes for the most delicious lunches.
And at Christmastime, it also makes an excellent sharing platter to start off a big family meal.
It’s not an exact art. Especially in our house. I tend to be more concerned about just getting rid of the stuff in the fridge that needs eating than putting together the perfect sharing platter. But the two often go hand in hand, as we’ve found with many a “that was the best lunch ever” leftovers meal.
So don’t feel restricted by my suggestions, and feel free to change ingredients to suit personal tastes and preferences (and what’s in the fridge). But I do enjoy a good ratio of meat:cheese:fruit:spreads:nuts and breads:veg. In our house, the ideal is mostly veg with a little of all the others, and we tend to keep dried fruit and other sugary things out of it or at least to a bare minimum.
In fact, my board looked a little veg bare this year so we served it alongside this Christmas veg beauty, and every scrap of both of them disappeared! 😉
If you fancy giving it a go – all you need is a head of fresh broccoli chopped into florets, some halved cherry tomatoes, half a lemon to chop into a star, a few chickpeas and some beetroot for presents (optional – the broccoli and cherry tomatoes do the job fine on their own!).
So here’s how our antipasti platter might look this year…
A healthier take on a platter containing just meats, cheese, sugary chutneys and dried fruit, this antipasti board features fresh fruit and veg, and is delicious and easy to boot! A great addition to the Christmas dinner - let's fill everyone up with veg first! 😉
- a mix of cured or cooked ham, salami, chorizo, salmon or trout, mackerel, etc
- 1 soft cheese (eg: Brie or Camembert)
- 1 hard cheese (eg: Cheddar)
- 1 goat's cheese (log or soft)
- 1 blue cheese (eg: Roquefort or Stilton)
- fresh fruit (grapes, figs, passionfruit, pomegranate, ripe pears or clementines are all good winter options)
- raw crudites vegetables (carrots, celery, cucumber, tomatoes, cauliflower or broccoli, radishes, olives, thinly sliced beetroot, etc)
- salad leaves (rocket, pea shoots, spinach, kale or mixed leaves)
- cooked vegetables (roasted carrots or root veg, roasted red peppers, roasted cauliflower or broccoli, cooked chestnuts, artichoke hearts in olive oil, pickled veg*, cooked beetroot wedges, etc)
- 2 types of nuts (cashews - see method for how to make roasted sweet & salty ones, walnuts, almonds, etc)
- 1-2 dips or spreads (pesto, red pepper spread, hummus, cheese spread, roasted veg spreads, baba ganoush, etc)
- bread and/or crackers (I used gluten free**)
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To make sweet & salty cashews, I tossed a pack of cashews in a drizzle of olive oil, a good glug (about 2 teaspoons) tamari and a teaspoon of organic raw honey (rice syrup also works really well for fructose free) and roasted them on a lined baking tray in an oven preheated to 200C/400F/gas 6 for about 5-10 minutes (take them out when they are just starting to catch). Allow to cool completely so they are crunchy.
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To put together the antipasti platter, start with the chunkier items: a couple of bowls with things like small olives, dips and nuts in, the chunks of cheese, bigger veg, breads. Then fill in the gaps with meats, more veg and fruit, etc. Dot the salad leaves around for colour and to fill in any smaller gaps. You can prep this in advance, just keep in the fridge if it will be out for more than an hour.
*if using shop-bought pickled veg, check the ingredients as some of them can be full to the brim with sugar. I like to use homemade veg pickled in vinegar and a little rice syrup (like my homemade cucumber pickles) or fermented in salt and water, but I do buy ready made sometimes if the ingredients and proportions are good ones.
**I made my favourite gluten free wholegrain buckwheat bread recipe here (other than soaking the buckwheat and chia for a little bit, it's all done in a mixer in a couple of minutes) which goes amazingly well with antipasti, and I bought these delicious gluten free black pepper crackers as I was in a rush (although some homemade oatcakes would go down pretty well as a homemade substitute).
