More Adventures in Food

After my foray into delicious tofu spread, I have ventured into the world of cream cheese spread. Basically only for the reason that I am too lazy to go to the organic supermarket and buy silken tofu, not only because it's farther from my house than the regular supermarket, but also because a certain four-year-old I know absolutely loses all control when we go into that place. I don't know if it's that organic earthy smell, or all the natural products, but something about that place makes him go crazy and touch everything and scare me that he's going to smash some Earth-friendly glass packaging. So I've taken to buying my raw materials at the supermarket: regular old cream cheese and delicious discs of goat's milk cream cheese. What I do then is smash and mix together about equal amounts of the two different kinds of cream cheese, then add all kinds of tasty nuts and bolts. So far I've come up with 3 variations:

Green Onion Cream Cheese
For this you start with your cream cheese mixture of equal parts of the two cream cheeses, then thinly slice two or three green onions, depending on how much cream cheese you want to make. You can also throw in a little finely chopped regular onion and some chives. Smash this all up and mix it (I find a fork works nicely) and add in just a bit of milk to make the mixture nice and spreadable. Throw in some salt and pepper to taste, and voila! Super yummy and easy spread #1!

Chipotle Cream Cheese
If you like things hot, then this is the one for you. Mix up your cream cheeses, then chop up about one chipotle pepper (a smoked jalapeno in spicy marinade) and some chili if you want it even hotter. Here I also tossed in some finely chopped onion, salt and pepper and stirred in a little milk. This one tastes great with the smoky chipotle flavor and has a nice slow burn from the hot peppers!

Tomato Basil Cream Cheese
This is a variation on one of my favorite themes: insalata caprese. For this I added two chopped sun dried tomatoes (from a jar, the kind in oil), a handful of fresh chopped basil from my window sill, a little milk for consistency, just a bit of finely chopped onion, salt and pepper and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Yum yum yum.

For some reason I've been on a whole grain bread kick for about the last week or so, and every one of these spreads tastes absolutely fabulous on a slice of toasted whole grain bread (right now I've got sunflower seed bread).