Martha Stewart's Best Game Day Appetizers | Cheese Ball, Chicken Wings, and Crudités

This is a puff pastry encased brie. It is a delicious hors d'oeuvre, just wonderful to serve with cocktails. It's also pretty nice to serve as a cheese course as dessert. It's really something. So mix one cup of dark brown sugar with one cup of fresh pecans. Mix this together with a large pinch of salt. Salt really does bring out the flavor of the pecans. So that's all mixed up. This is going to go on top of the brie inside the pastry. And now the pastry, this is one half of my basic puff pastry recipe. Roll it to about 20 by 20 inches. 20 by 20 will be just right for about an eight inch brie. Use enough bench flour on your puff pastry so that the pastry does not stick to your counter, but not so much that it will get tough. This is beautiful. It's doing very nicely. If per chance it gets a little bit soft, just put it on a baking sheet and get it right back into the refrigerator. So your puff pastry measures just about 20 inches. Put your brie right in the center and top with all of this, the brown sugar, salt and pecans. And this melts down into the entire creation and tastes so utterly fantastic. So now what you want to do is bring the sides up. See how they come right to the center of the brie? This is important because you want to cover that brie. And it seems like a lot of pastry, but actually you're going to eat the brie with the pastry. So and these corners are sort of opened out like this. All gathered it will look like a fabric covered cheese. Although you don't know what's inside because that's the surprise. And now gather up the corners and let them fall like fabric. I think it's so pretty there. Gather it like this, almost twist it and tie it with your baker's twine right here. And I like to tie in a bow because then I can sometimes untie it and get this right back onto your baking sheet. Get this chilled and you can trim a little bit more of this off if you like. But you can do this right before you put it in the oven too. It has to go back and chill for at least a half an hour and preheat your oven at the same time 400 degrees. And so now one egg yolk and two tablespoons of heavy cream make our glaze. This glaze will help the puff pastry get a beautiful golden brown color. And I love the package. It looks so pretty with the baker's twine holding the thing together. This looks like a pretty pretty brie present and it tastes like a present. So work on this very quickly while it's still very cold and then pop it straight into a 400 degree oven. Try not to have a big puddle of egg wash on the baking sheet. You don't want to have any cooked egg there. So that goes right into the oven 400 degrees for about 20 minutes. Reduce the heat and cook until the pastry is a golden brown and and looks thoroughly cooked. So here is what I was talking about. This is a presentation and this is the brie. It does look like a glorious package and when you cut into it right through the puff pastry, it is so beautiful. There you have a slice. Now you can put it on a little toast like this. You can eat it with a dried fig, an apricot, a grape, some almonds, but oh my gosh this is what it's all about. The ooziness. And you have to eat it fast. Really spectacular. Growing up, chicken wings were my favorite part of the chicken. Well, they still are and ours are absolutely super delicious because we've marinated them in honey, added a little lime for an extra kick of flavor, a little bit of salt and pepper and garlic and they're done. Well, let me show you how to make them. They're so easy. In a large glass bowl like this, add the zest of two limes and we've just taken the peel right off the limes down to the white pith. So this is your lime, a third of a cup of freshly squeezed lime juice. That's about three limes depending on how dry the limes are. Four cloves of garlic that are smashed and you can just roll a clove of garlic like that in one of these great garlic peelers. Have you seen this? I haven't used it for a while on the show, but you just do that and look your garlic clove is absolutely peeled. It's like magic. So this goes in here and you can smash the garlic if you like a little bit. Get that into your marinade. A quarter of a cup of honey and I love our measuring spoons. Oh, secret two. Another good thing. Take a little bit of vegetable spray. Just spray the bowl of the spoon and the honey will slide right out. Not a lot of sticking in the spoon. It's a good hint. And Tabasco sauce, just a little bit. Remember if you're making this for kids, they don't like a lot of hot stuff. So about a quarter of a teaspoon and two tablespoons of soy sauce. Kids love soy sauce. So stir that up and add your chicken wings. Now the chicken wings, four pounds washed and patted dry. And we have those prepared right here in the refrigerator and keep them cold. It's real important to keep chicken wings, any meat, really cold in your refrigerator before you're using them. But these have been washed and look how nice and plump they are. They're really great. And stir them around in your marinade. And these should marinate for anywhere from three hours to eight hours. Try to get the marinade all over. Keep sort of swirling them around or turning them a couple times just so that the flavor gets everywhere. Cover the bowl and refrigerate. And we have one that's already marinated. Here they are. And I've lined two baking sheets with aluminum foil. You can not bother to line, but boy you're gonna have a mess because the honey marinade sticks to the bottom of the pan. And with foil you'll avoid massive cleanup. It's really great. And make sure that you keep the foil up a little ways around the edge so that you don't have any leakage underneath. And here we have our wings. These can go in an oven 450 degrees and they take about 20 minutes on one side. You're going to brush them with the marinade and turn them and brush them again and cook them for another 25 minutes and brush them a couple times during the cooking process. So you see I have spread them out and I'm going to sprinkle now with salt. Just a little bit of coarse salt. Kosher salt's great. Sea salt. The flavor is wonderful. And right into the 450 degree oven. And we have one tray that's still to come out here. Let's have a look. Oh it looks definitely delicious. Look at the color. Really great, don't you think? So these are going to be added right to our platter. Mouth-watering. After tasting Jonathan King's old farmhouse chutney that Stonewall Kitchen sells up in York, Maine, it reminded me about an old-fashioned cheese ball that I had long, long time ago. One of my friends made the most delicious cheese ball. I've never made one in my whole life but Jonathan said he had a recipe that was given to him by the chef at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. In a bowl you'll want to put two packages of cream cheese. Two eight ounce packages at room temperature. It's kind of important to have it at room temperature so that it is soft. One half cup of old farmhouse chutney and that recipe is so superb. If you haven't used it, you must try it because it is delicious. And we're going to add a half a cup of shredded Monterey Jack cheese. Of course you can substitute white cheddar for this if you like. And a half a cup of shredded Colby cheese. Any orange cheddar would do. Scallions. A quarter of a cup of finely chopped scallion. The green part, really pretty. A little bit of garlic, one medium clove of garlic that's been very finely minced or crushed. And some salt and pepper. I would like to add a big pinch of pepper and a pinch of coarse salt. And so just stir this up until it's well combined and the chutney actually gives it a pretty color. The chutney has cranberries in it which add a little pink tinge to the cream cheese. You can serve this with your favorite cracker, with melba toast, with slices of fresh pear or fresh apple. So here, now we're going to form this into a ball. This is the messy part. Pulls together pretty well. And have a flat dish. I have a lot of freshly chopped pecans. One cup of freshly chopped nuts. You could use walnuts if you don't have pecans but the pecans are just the nicest flavor for this cheese ball. And roll this in the nuts, making sure to coat the entire outside. Try to keep pressing it into the nuts to use up as many as possible. Now chill this and then when you're serving it, you can just put it out on a board. And I have some sliced apples and some delicious crackers right here. Now doesn't that look delicious and rather cute? Sliced apples, crackers. I think I'll sample a little bit right on a very fine sliver of Granny Smith apple. Tastes just as good as my friends. There's a really good reason that you always find crudités, which are raw vegetables, and cheese at a cocktail party. They're just the right thing to nibble on with your drinks. The challenge doesn't always lie in the recipes themselves but in finding innovative and really pretty ways to present outstanding vegetables in glasses like this adds a lot of contemporary and visual impact to a table. This dip is really delicious. You mix into one cup of sour cream, two tablespoons of buttermilk. Buttermilk is so good and it just thins this out making it a little bit easier to dip your vegetables into. Stir that together and one whole shallot that's been finely minced, a little bit of salt, just sprinkling, a half a teaspoon of fresh thyme leaves, and about a third of a teaspoon of green peppercorns, red peppercorns. These are so colorful and they taste so different from one another. And black peppercorns. Stir that in and some chives, about two teaspoons of fresh chives. Chop them very very finely. Just make sure there are no big pieces. And that's your dip. And it can just sit in the bowl until you've finished all the raw vegetables. Now this can be in any kind of bowl really. So I'm going to actually put the dip in one of the small tumblers. The beauty about crudités is that each and every ingredient tastes delicious. Carrots, which are peeled and beautiful and bite-sized. These are very thin long carrots. They'll look very nice just standing upright in one of our tumblers like that. The asparagus are beautiful and these are thin kind of medium to small asparagus. And these have been blanched just because blanched asparagus tastes a lot better than raw asparagus. Raw scallions, very pretty, very crispy. Choose the smallest and finest and sweetest green onions that you can find. Those two can be just placed in a glass like that. Now we have celery and I suggest just cutting each clean stalk into kind of maybe quarters. They should be kept cold until right before serving. So far all of these ingredients are pretty ordinary. This is a jicama, a very wonderful root. And this should be peeled and cut into match sticks measuring three to five inches in length. We have one that's already peeled. You can slice this into nice slices about a quarter of an inch thick. Jicama is native to Mexico, Central and South America. Just cut this into nice even what we call match sticks. They're actually a little bigger than match sticks. Zucchinis are delicious but I find just slices of raw zucchini kind of unappealing. So what we've done is take the zucchini and sliced it on a mandolin about a sixteenth of an inch thick. First cut off the stem end and the other end and then just slice it into long thin slices like that. And then you can roll up these slices like that and it looks like a totally different vegetable. And these you can prepare ahead of time. Just make sure that you keep them chilled. You can roll a jicama like this too. It works nicely. Cucumbers, you can choose curvy cucumbers if you like or any nice long Japanese pickling cucumber and cut it into oh maybe eighths or or twelfths and stand those upright too in one of your glasses. String beans, yellow string beans, purple string beans or green string beans can be blanched over 30 seconds or so just to take the hardness away from them. Always trim the stem ends and leave the nice little curly end because it looks so pretty as a crudite. And these two once they're chilled are very very tasty and these should be in a shorter glass. We have cherry tomatoes. Oh I just love these. They come in so many odd shapes. These are yellow pears. You can mix those with red cherries. You might find orange pear tomatoes or whatever you can find. Just pile them into one of the goblets. And one more thing our beautiful white crispy endive. Just cut off the bottoms and release the leaves. They can come apart very nicely. Stand those up in a glass. What a crudite platter like this should be is easy access, freshness, great color and a lot of crispness.