Cream Cheese Appetizers? Two Recipes Coming Up!

Cream cheese appetizers often use the food that acts like glue to make your dish the ideal antidote to sheer hunger before a meal is shared. After all, what would lox and bagels be without the pure white cheese spread?

That said, to be more creative with this particular ingredient, chef Kurt Cyr from Palm Springs’ top haunt The Saguaro shares two of his favorite concoctions of this nature and the way to make them, too.

Cream Cheese Appetizers? Two Recipes Coming Up!

The first is a cream cheese beef log that packs a real cream cheese punch. Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:

1 8-oz package cream cheese

¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese

1 tablespoon horseradish

1/3 cup chopped green olives

2.5 oz (1 cup) chipped beef (Buddig dried beef) finely snipped

Directions:

Blend together cream cheese, Parmesan cheese and horseradish. Stir in chopped olives. Shape into 6″ x 1.5″ diameter rolls. Chill several hours or overnight. Before serving, roll in snipped dried beef. Serve with Ritz and Country Club crackers.

Meanwhile, chef Cyr’s other cream cheese appetizers are actually called ham balls. The recipe follows:

Ingredients

2 4.5 oz cans of deviled ham

1 tablespoon prepared mustard

3 tablespoons chopped stuffed green olives

Bottled hot pepper sauce (Frank’s Red Hot or Tasbasco)

1 3-oz package cream cheese

2 teaspoons milk

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Directions

Blend delived ham, olives, mustard and hot sauce. Form into ball. Chill. Combine cream cheese and milk. Frost the ham ball with cream chees mixture. Chill. Remove from refrigerator 15 minutes before serving and sprinkle with chopped parsley. Serve with Ritz and Country Club crackers.

And so, as cream cheese appetizers go beyond bagel bites fitted with lox, you can add two recipes to savor that include this American staple that was said to be accidentally discovered in the U.S. by a dairyman called William Lawrence. That was back in 1872 when cream cheese was packaged in foil wrappers. Some things never change.

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