#11 Crustmas Part Three: Party

Short and delicious

Time to wrap up the Crustmas mini-series and get back to regular programming. So let me tell you how to throw the best New Year’s party on a budget!!!

Crucially, these 3 top tips can be applied to any party. So I will be expecting invites…

If you missed them, you can find Part One: Dinner here and Part Two: Cake here.

Thank you so much for your lovely comments on this series - whether via Substack or instagram. It really is so so nice to hear that you liked them :)

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Part Three: Party

This final installment in the Crustmas series is going to be short and sweet, much like the period of New Year’s Eve in which I was fully cognicent…

I am going to give you just a few tips.

1. Pre-batch cocktails

This is non-negotiable. We first pulled out this trick at C’s birthday a few years ago at the house in Seven Sisters. It guarantees Best Party Ever status.

The reason is simple: everyone gets drunk very quickly. Not the sleepy-sloppy- groggy drunk of wine nor the slow-heavy-tiddly drunk of beer. With a cocktail in a plastic cup, we’re all main characters: sparky-oohey-silly-ready-to-have-the-best-night-of-my-life drunkenness. No tinny-sipping lurkers in the corner having sober conversations no please.

If you’re splitting the costs with housemates, you can buy enough alcohol to make litres of cocktails. Between four of us, we spent about £25 each - Lidl first for outrageously cheap vodka and cranberry juice, then Big Tescos for cointreau and limes. We filled 5 or 6 glass bottles with Cosmos (which we’ve been hooked on since Christmas dinner) and put them in the top drawer of the freezer.

And you can ask friends to bring top-up spirits:

For extra pazaz, we ordered a load of semi-disposable martini glasses from Amazon. Lah di dah.

2. Pre-match pasta

Once you’ve pushed the sofas aside, stolen a sound system from a friend and put all the coats on your bedroom floor, don’t forget to eat.

Whilst the spaghetti’s on the boil, make a simple and delicious sauce: garlic, anchovies, tinned tomatoes, red wine, tah dah.

Slurp it in an empty room and hope your friends show up…

3. Listen to your housemates when they tell you that people don’t want 90 devilled eggs at a houseparty…

This is the final tip. If you, like me, are going to come back from the alcohol run with H and be outraged that A and B have only made 60 devilled eggs (60? Everyone will want at least 5 each!) maybe just take a moment to pause and think… Are we really living in the ugly-chic 70s drinks party fantasy that you think we are? Or are we just normal people in our mid-20s holding a house party for New Year’s Eve. Because your sweet housemates will succumb to you bossing them around and they will make 30 more… But is that what you really want?

Ultimately it was a weird move. Everyone found it at least a little bit weird. I’m yet to find someone who thought it was as good of an idea as I did… I mean imagine turning up to a house party full of eggs? I’d find it weird…

Worst of all the fridge let out a horrible fart smell every time it was opened. I’d leap to cover it as if my nakedness had just been exposed. Don’t look at all those devilled eggs!!

Waking up on New Year’s day sandwiched between two friends in my bed, I may have been the only person in the world whose first thought was devilled eggs. I rushed downstairs to hide the shamefully untouched plates and pretend that they’d been happily eaten.

But thank god for drunk people. They really will go for anything at 5am. There were only a few sad eggs remaining. Though it might be better to stick to crisps next time…