By Bec Vrana Dickinson

With Christmas just around the corner, maybe you’re already starting to plan get-togethers and parties. Or at least you’re ruminating on them and this year, dammit, you want fresh ideas, you want to keep things easy, and you want flavour to the max. Well, we suspect Bec Vrana Dickinson, chef and author of Happy Hour Snacks, heard your call and whipped this book together to make your festive (and other) snacking simpler. 

The book features around 80 recipes, organised into chapters themed around salt, spice, smoke, acid, cheese, and sweets, but with catchy titles like “Cheese Sleaze” and “The Smoke and Spice Show.” Dickinson’s recipes are meant to be ‘looser, lazier, and louder’ than your typical wine bar or cocktail party fare, featuring the use of store-bought shortcuts. Think premade pizza dough, frozen chips, microwave rice, ready-to-go falafel, smoked mussels, and yes, even chicken nuggets.

Each recipe is given a ‘commitment level’ rating – either ‘Quickie’, ‘Minimal Investment’ or ‘Go The Distance’ – so you can easily gauge how much effort is required. Although truthfully, nothing in this book seems overly difficult or time consuming. Each recipe is paired with a drink suggestion, and you’ll find a few cocktail recipes sprinkled throughout. Two examples of these are the Bloody Good Mary, which spices up the classic with wasabi, ginger, and fish sauce, and the batch-made We-Groni, a Suze/Lillet Blanc twist on the traditional Negroni.

We like recipes like Breadsticks with Harissa Toum, where the genius is all in the putting together of purchased olive bread, baba ganoush and Lebanese garlic dip to create a delicious, scoopable assemblage embellished with harissa, pineuts and EVOO. If you were wondering, you drink this with dry rose. Beanbag Chips are where you bake potato chips with pepper, chilli powder, onion and garlic powders, makrut lime leaves and salted peanuts, and it’s designed to be washed down with a Pickleback (that’s a shot of whiskey chased with pickle brine, for those who need to Google it like we did).

An Evening With French Men is a combo of smoked fish, cream cheese and horseradish on baguette, with Kir as the recommended drink, while Spanish Spuds are made using pre-cooked microwave potatoes, tubs of marinated baby octopus and roasted capsicum strips, topped with EVOO and smoked paprika. We love the pages where Dickinson gives creative yet casual takes on ingredients like hot chips and oils, offering distinct variations packed with flavour, made with minimal effort.

We particularly love that each recipe includes a list of “The Subs,” making it easy to swap ingredients if needed (the author is based in Melbourne so some things will be easier to source there than in parts of NZ). For example, if you can’t find duck rillettes, pâté works as an alternative. Or you can swap out 'nduja for chorizo, or ricotta salata for feta. This flexibility makes the book accessible, even when certain ingredients are hard to come by.

The tone is hyper-relaxed, slightly irreverent, and very modern, which some might find a little much at times. But look, it fits the contemporary, laid-back vibe of the recipes, as does the photography style. Flashy, grungy, and unpolished, this also might be polarising. It’s a bold and take-no-prisoners approach to illustrating food, and while some will love it, others may not think it will age well.

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