While I love baking and cooking, one of my favorite things to make for a party, holiday or just a Thursday is charcuterie.

I grew up eating a lot of cheese and crackers for snacks and holiday meals, which has led me to order charcuterie at restaurants as an adult.

I love making cheese boards and snack boards, especially ones with multiple ingredients, because it always seems like there are infinite combinations to try.

It is also easy to adapt to whatever your dietary restrictions are. All photos here are vegetarian. Some items are vegan, lactose-free, dairy-free, gluten-free and/or low FODMAP.

Ingredients
· Cheeses: At minimum, you need something hard and aged along with something soft and creamy. We like an aged cheddar and goat cheese. Most times we add a third or fourth cheese, commonly a brie or something spicy like a scorpion pepper gouda.
· Base: You need something to put your cheese and other board ingredients on. I generally have a sliced baguette and at least two different kinds of crackers on my boards. Chips (especially something more flat like a pita chip) are a good option as well.
· A savory spread: Dips, hummus, guacamole, mustard, pico de gallo and tapenade make fantastic additions to a cheese board.
· Something crunchy: Veggies (carrots and radishes) and/or nuts (walnuts and almonds) are perfect toppings.
· A sweet spread: One of my go-to combinations when filling up my plate is to have a base (baguette slice or cracker) topped with something sweet like jam, honey, syrup or granola butter. Then I add a bit of cheese and maybe a nut on the top. It’s the perfect bite!
· Something tart: Dried fruit and/or regular fruit can provide a tasty pop of color to your board.
· Something sweet: In addition to a spread, having a little dark chocolate or a garnish of kettle corn can make your snack board stand out.
· Something salty: Vegetarian deli meat/salami and/or some olives will do the trick here. I would say this is optional since most cheeses are fairly salty.

Instructions
Pull out all the ingredients you plan to put on your board.

Assess what will take up the most space (usually the bases, the cheeses and the spreads), and place those items first. To make our board festive for the Academy Awards, we’ll be pulling out my Oscar-shaped cookie cutter for our goat cheese.

Fill in the gaps between those bigger items with smaller things like carrots, grapes or dark chocolate-covered almonds. Start with your bigger items and work your way down to the smallest.

If you’re using fresh fruit or a jam, you can do something creative like place or spread them on top of one of the cheeses (see the raspberries in the above and below photos).

Try not to put anything too prone to roll on the edges, especially if you need to transport your board from the kitchen to the living room — or an even longer distance, i.e. your friend’s house for a gathering.

The Easy Route
Because these directions don’t require you to make any of the board components from scratch, this is already one of the easiest routes. That being said, some grocery stores, restaurants and cheese shops can provide you with pre-made cheese or snack boards for your event or your Thursday evening.

The Pairing
I love having something like this for a big TV-watching event like the Oscars because it’s something you can put out on the coffee table and be done with. You can just pop back in to the kitchen during the commercial breaks if a couple components need refills.

You can also tie it more to the night’s Oscar-nominated films by purchasing items to represent them.

This year, you could get Irish cheddar in honor of “Belfast,” seaweed snacks to represent “Drive My Car” and/or licorice bites for “Licorice Pizza.”

You could also go a little further and make arepas and/or buñuelos to stack on your snack board to represent “Encanto.”

Other items like the movie theater-linked popcorn or my Oscar-shaped cheese can be more general references to the night.

I’m going to go live on the @veg_out_recipes Instagram at 2 p.m. Central on Sunday (March 24) while I make our snack board. There will be cheese, (gluten-free) bread and lots of other goodies.

We will also be live-tweeting the Academy Awards on Sunday night, starting at 5 p.m. Central with the pre-show red carpet coverage and continuing until they hand out the Best Picture Oscar at the end of the ceremony. Use #VegOutOscars or tag us @veg_out_recipes on Twitter to join.

Most importantly, if you build a choose-your-own-adventure snack board for the Oscars or any other occasion using our tips and tricks, let us know! Tag us in your Instagram posts & stories, tweets or TikTok videos: @veg_out_recipes