We can pretend that 1-37: Savory Cheese Appetizers is something fancy and unique, but it’s really just a blue cheese spread on squares of white bread. If you like blue cheese, I suppose this could be an exciting concept–the 1980s were big on both blue cheese and dips (which this recipe can double as).
Simply Delicious has a lot of blue cheese-related recipes–a few I covered just recently include 5-20: Golden Cheese Tartlettes and 1-20: Prosciutto Appetizers. After making all three of these essentially back-to-back, I’m a little burned out on blue cheese for a while.
You can make your own white bread for this or use store-bought–I usually would have made my own, but I had planned to make these as snacks when Adam was out of town a few weeks ago and was feeling lazy, so store-bought it was. Since these were just for me, I also omitted the radishes (because I don’t like them) and the grapes (because although I like grapes, I would have just picked them off the top of something like this).
Ingredients. I mentioned the store-bought bread already, but it wasn’t until I laid everything out that I realize a) I had no chives and b) the green onions I did have were way past the point of usability.
I made a last minute decision to swap chives/green onions for some jarred sun-dried tomatoes I found way in the back of the fridge. As I mentioned in 5-20: Golden Cheese Tartlettes and 1-20: Prosciutto Appetizers, I couldn’t commit to just blue cheese, so there’s some Gorgonzola there as well.
I cut the crusts off with my offset bread knife–a worthy investment for sandwiches and all other bread-related items.
Used the smaller in-set bowl of my food processor to blend the spread.
The tomatoes and spices gave it more of a red hue afterwards than I had intended.
Applied the spread to two of the crustless bread squares. It’s definitely redder/tomato-ier than it was intended to be.
Overall, I’m not sure substituting sun-dried tomatoes for chives was a good swap–both the tomatoes and the cheese have such strong flavors that it became really overwhelming after a while. I saved the rest of the spread to use as a dip, and after a day or two it was so strong that I had to get rid of the rest of it. I’m not sure if chives would have made it smoother/milder (probably), but I don’t know if I care to find out.
(And yes, I’m aware that I changed virtually everything about the recipe, and that’s probably why it didn’t work out well. Welcome to the internet in 2017–where everything is someone else’s fault.)
Grade: C
