Long Island Larder: New Year's Buffet

Thanksgiving, then Christmas or Chanukah, then finally we celebrate with a last hurrah the end of the old year and beginning of the new. While New Year's Eve isn't regarded by most people as a feasting occasion, something to eat must be provided along with all the hilarity, champagne, and dancing. One must keep up one's strength, after all.

Those who choose to see in the New Year calmly may decide on a New Year's Day open house, usually with a mid-day buffet that can take almost any form from a breakfasty brunch to a full-featured festive lunch. So what follows are some treats and dishes that can fit into almost any venue.

And since most of us have been dining on turkey, beef, and ham for quite a few meals, fish and vegetables dishes that rest lightly on the overtaxed digestive system will probably be welcomed by all the New Year's celebrants.

Sometimes listed on menus as saumon frais or saumon l'aneth, this is fresh salmon cured, but not smoked, in the traditional Swedish manner. In Scandinavia, the preparation is called gravlax, which translates to "buried salmon."

Buried in fresh dill, which is a lot easier to find than it used to be, but you'll need a lot more than those pathetic little packages in the supermarket. If you have to settle for those, buy at least four, but the best sources for a really big bunch of fresh dill are fancy food shops.

Finding the dill is the hardest part of this recipe, which is simplicity itself. Start three days ahead of time, refrigerate and turn the fish over once every 12 hours, and that's all there is to it.

Gravlax: Day One

2 matching center-cut fillets of salmon, about 3 lbs. total

1/4 cup coarse salt

2 Tbsp. white sugar

2 Tbsp. coarsely ground white peppercorns

2 really big bunches fresh dill, about 8 ozs.

Wash the fillets in cold running water and dry them well. Often there are tiny bones in the flesh, most easily removed with a pair of needle-nosed pliers (a handy implement to keep in the kitchen). Run your fingers along the fleshy side and you'll feel the bones.

Combine the salt, sugar, and ground white pepper and rub it into the cut sides of the fish. Lay one fillet skin-side down on a double thickness of foil. Arrange the dillweed on top of it and cover with the other matching half. Close up the foil tightly and lay it on a platter in the fridge.

The Next Three Days

Turn it over twice a day for three days. During this time it should be lightly weighted - a board or another platter with a few evenly distributed cans set on top; three soup cans would weigh about the right amount. Or use beach stones arranged the length of the fillets.

After three days, or four is all right too, wipe the fillets dry and discard the wilted dill. Carve only as much as you think will be eaten at any one time, in diagonal slices about an eighth of an inch thick. It isn't necessary or desirable to carve it as thinly as smoked salmon.

Serve the gravlax on a plate with buttered seven-grain sourdough or some other bread with character, accompanied by the following sauce:

Mustard Dill Sauce

1 1/2 cups thin, homemade mayonnaise or Hellman's Light

1/4 cup Dijon mustard

1/2 cup fresh dill, minced

Use one whole, fresh egg to make a light, homemade mayonnaise. (It's advisable to buy certified organic eggs for all preparations that involve raw eggs.)

Put the egg in a blender and turn the machine on high. Add one cup of oil, half olive and half peanut or canola, pouring it in a fine stream until the sauce thickens.

Add the mustard and check the consistency. Add a tablespoon of warm water at a time, until you have a nearly pourable sauce. Whir in the dill. This will keep well in the fridge up to a week.

Don't add salt. The mustard has plenty of it.

The Three Musketeers

These three stalwarts of the cocktail hour appeal to a wide variety of ages and backgrounds and go with a wide variety of drinks, from aquavit and beer to white and ros‚ wines, champagne, or any kind of drinks made with hard liquor.

Taramasalata, a Greek specialty, is a smooth cream of salted, smoked cod or mullet roe.

Tapenade, the Provencale mix of salty flavors, is comprised of olives, anchovies, garlic, lemon, oil, and - my own eccentricity - tuna fish.

And, of course, hummus, which Americans have taken to with almost as much fervor as pizza. You can buy hummus in a variety of flavorings in supermarkets from Key West to Nome, but why anyone does I can't imagine. Nothing could be simpler or cheaper to make at home.

Taramasalata

Dried, pressed mullet roe is the authentic basis of this Middle Eastern appetizer, but almost any kind of smoked or salted roe can be used. Smoked cod roe makes a good tarama, and sometimes you can find canned, pressed mullet roe in supermarkets or specialty stores. The assertive flavorings make the choice of smoked or salted roe fairly insignificant.

Serve this with pita cut in small triangles or small, thin toast points.

3 to 4 ozs. tarama or any smoked fish roe

3 thick slices white bread, crust removed

1/2 cup milk

3 cloves garlic, pureed

Grated rind and juice of one lemon

4 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil

Plenty of freshly milled black or white pepper

Garnish: imported black Medi terranean olives

Remove the membrane from the smoked roe and break it into pieces. Soak the bread in the milk, squeeze it dry, and put it and the roe into a food processor or blender. Add the garlic, lemon juice and rind, olive oil, and pepper to taste. Blend to a creamy, pale puree.

Scrape the taramasalata into a shallow bowl and garnish it with the olives. Don't bother with California black olives. They are pathetically tasteless.

Tapenade

This old Provencale sauce, salty with capers, anchovies, and olives, was originally used with cold boiled beef or poached fish, but it is also an interesting dip for raw vegetables on a crudit‚ platter. My own favorite "carriers" are tiny triangles of pita bread.

Tapenade is also delicious with grilled tuna, mako, or swordfish.

Makes 11/2 cups.

1 Tbsp. drained capers

1 2-ounce can anchovy fillets

1/2 cup olive oil

1 7-ounce can tuna fish in oil

10 stoned Calamata or similar olives

Juice of half a lemon

1 or 2 cloves garlic, pulverized

Freshly milled black pepper to taste

Put all the ingredients, including the oil from the tuna and anchovies, into the bowl of a food processor. Pulse the machine until you have a rough puree. At this point it is the right texture to use as a dip, but too stiff for a sauce. Thin it out a little with cool water.

Tapenade is delicious mixed with the yolks of hard-boiled eggs, which are then put back into the whites to make that forbidden food, stuffed (or deviled) eggs.

Hummus

You can add chopped olives, bits of sun-dried tomatoes, minced scallions, fresh minced parsley, or hot red pepper flakes to the basic mixture - in fact, a double recipe can be divided and flavored differently to suit a wider variety of palates.

Makes about 3 cups.

3 cups cooked chickpeas, canned or freshly cooked

3 or 4 fat cloves garlic, pureed

1/2 cup tahini paste (sesame seed butter)

2 Tbsp. olive oil

Juice of one or two lemons (to taste)

Salt to taste

Garnish: finely minced fresh parsley

If using canned chickpeas, rinse them in a bowl of cool water and skim off the skins that rise to the surface. When I'm feeling especially ambitious, I roll them in a dish towel to remove the thin husks, but this isn't strictly necessary.

If you cook the chickpeas (garbanzos) from scratch, the husks will rise to the surface and you can skim them off as they cook - usually about an hour after an overnight soak.

Easy On The Lemon

Puree the garlic in a food processor, then add the chickpeas and all other ingredients except the parsley. Taste carefully for seasoning, but don't overdo the lemon juice or it will taste like nothing else.

I like a bit of cayenne pepper in hummus, though it isn't traditional. However, most of the hummus you buy contains all sorts of nonauthentic ingredients - sour cream, even.

It should be creamy, about the consistency of whipped cream. You can add a bit of warm water to achieve this, or some of the cooking liquid.

While this is usually served with some kind of Middle Eastern flatbread, it's very good with tortilla chips, especially attractive with the blue corn variety. Decorate the perimeter of the dish of hummus with minced parsley.