3 Easy, Delicious Holiday Appetizer recipes!

Welcome to Whipple Whale Holler. I'm Miss Laurie and this is Mr. Brown. We live in the hills of Arkansas. We love the Lord. Keepers are the old way but accept some of the new. We love to cook and we love to eat. We love to garden. It's in our blood. It's how we stay sustainable and fill our pantry. We do a lot of canning and preserving. We live a sustainable life. We love our family. We work hard and every once in a while we like to dance. So y'all join us. Okay y'all, I have to confess. My favorite thing to eat when I go to any get-together are the appetizers and the little finger foods. I just love them. I can't help it. So that's what we're going to be doing today. We're going to be making three different appetizers or finger foods or whatever you call them. They're going to be, one of them is going to be really quick put together but oh so good. And then the other two, we got a little bit of cooking to do but I guarantee you everybody's going to love them. So what I plan on doing from this point on all the way to Christmas is any video that I put up myself. Now Mr. Brown might be another but I'm going to be doing candy cookies and appetizers finger food to get us ready for all the holiday parties and all the holidays. So let's get started on our three appetizers. Okay I know what you're thinking, Lori that's just cream cheese and celery. And you're right but we're going to take this up a notch because I'm telling y'all this is one of the easiest but one of the best little finger foods, hors d'oeuvre or appetizer to start off a party. Christmas party, dinner party, whatever. And it's just celery or you can use any kind of crackers and I've got cream cheese. Now they sell the whipped cream cheese where it's already whipped and soft. I didn't have any I just got regular cream cheese and I just kind of stirred it up a little bit and softened it up and I'm just putting it on my on my celery. Now how many of us have not have already had cream cheese and celery? You've even had probably celery and peanut butter celery and pimento cheese just whatever. And take you any kind of little cracker or little bagel pieces that you can get at Walmart, the little bitty tiny ones and just spread you some cream cheese. Now they have different kind of cream cheeses too but we're fixing to put something on here that you really just need your regular cream cheese and you serve this at any party and there's not going to be any of it left. I guarantee you you'll be back in the kitchen making more that's how fast it's going to go. So you got your celery and cream cheese, you got your different kind of crackers if you like and what I've got here is I've got everything bagel seasoning and that's all this is going to be. A little sprinkling of everything bagel seasoning on all this. Now if there's some of y'all that may not have ever tried this if you haven't you've got to. This is the best stuff. When I make some homemade rolls and my and breads and stuff I'll sprinkle this on top and you talk about good. This is good on homemade pretzels and those of y'all that have ate this y'all know how addicting it is. It's so good and it makes everything look pretty too. So everything bagel seasoning and that's all that is and of course you want to make a bunch of it too because people are going to be eating the pooey out of them. So that's our first appetizer. You want something fast something good you serve this. I guarantee you they're going to like it and we're going to taste one. Whoops it's pure yumminess. I just I love this stuff. Now the celery now you know celery that just doesn't have much taste but you put something on it that's so good. So y'all let's go on to our second appetizer. Okay we are on our second appetizer and this is your sausage balls. Now I know a lot of people make sausage balls. I've made them for years and years and we always make sure that we have them on Christmas morning for breakfast especially but this is a and you can buy this at Walmart and most of your grocery stores. You might can order it online I'm not sure. This is 11.36 ounces is what this is and it comes with your biscuit mix and your little herb blend pack. So what I've got here is I've got eight ounces of Monterey Jack. You can use pepper jack. I've got eight ounces of cheddar. You can use mild, sharp, whatever kind of cheddar you like. Colby and I've got a pound of breakfast sausage. You can use the hot. We like the mild breakfast sausage. You can use kind with sage in it just whatever you like. So now we're just going to add our biscuit mix and our little packet of our herb blend and don't forget to put this in. Now if you want to add a little bit some more spices or something to it you can sure do that. Now I'm going to get in here and I'm going to get all this mixed up and then we're going to make our little sausage balls. Okay we got our mixture all together there. You can see how it come together. You just have to get in there with your hands and you just have to mix it up. It don't take very long. You just got to mix it mix it till you get all that dry biscuit mix all mixed in with your other. And what I like to do of course I'm not going to be cooking all this because well I don't need all of it tonight but I'm going to cook enough for y'all to see what they look like when they're cooked and then I'll taste them. But most of them are going to be rolling up into sausage balls and flash freezing them and putting them in a bag in the freezer and then I'll take them out at Christmas morning frozen and stick them in the oven and cook them and they'll be you know they'll just be all ready for and ready to go. Just won't be one less thing you have to do. Now I like to make mine that's a little bit too big. That's about right it's about the size of maybe a a walnut a small walnut shell or something like that just a little ping-pong ball really you don't you don't even want it as big as a ping-pong ball you want it just about like that like an inch inch size ball just like that and just put it on your trays. Now if you want them bigger that's fine it's just going to take a little longer for them to cook because you want them to cook all the way through and they're going to cook at 350 and you know everybody's oven varies so anywhere from I would say my oven's going to take probably about 20 minutes but we'll know when we get them out. So I'm going to continue to make see even that one's a little bit bigger than what I want but you know you know what I'm saying just get them pretty much all the same size so that they all cook same amount of time. So I'm gonna make enough of these to cook and taste and plate up and then like I said the rest of them are going to go in the freezer for Christmas morning. Okay we got them all done here for this this sheet pan and I'm gonna put these in the oven 350 20-25 minutes and then I'm gonna finish all my other ones up and put them in the freezer. Okay now that our mushrooms I've cleaned them off we're gonna take the stems out of them all you got to do is just kind of hold them in your hand like this and twist the stem if it don't all come out you can just go in there and take it out with your fingers or a spoon but you're not going to throw away these stems because we'll chop these up and we'll put them in with the rest of our filling ingredients and I've got that cooking over there on the stove I've got a half well the recipe calls for half a pound of Italian ground sausage you can use spicy mild sweet whichever you like and if you don't like Italian sausage which I cannot imagine not like an Italian sausage you can use just regular breakfast sausage I guess but I'm telling you using the Italian sausage is so good and with all the other ingredients that we're going to be putting in it so I'm just going to chop these stems up I'm going to get my Italian sausage cooked up and then we'll go from there our sausage balls have come out of the oven and they cooked for 25 minutes I'm gonna let them sit here cool off where I bite into one what I've got over here is I've got my Italian sausage cooking and it's pretty much done I went ahead and cooked a whole pound the recipe calls for a half a pound but I like to cook ahead and what I don't use I'll just put in the freezer for another time I can use this Italian sausage for so many different things it smells so good but I'm going to put it over here on the side let it drain just a little bit now there's several different ingredients in this recipe but it's just so good you use about a 24 ounce package of mushrooms button mushrooms or any of your favorite mushrooms that you can whole mushrooms that you can fill so there's a little bit of grease in there from my Italian sausage but I'm going to pour just a little bit of olive oil in because I'm fixing to saute my onions this is a about a medium sweet onion I'm gonna let that cook just a minute and then we'll put our garlic in there and there's our sausage balls plated up this is one of my all-time favorite appetizers they just they go good with any kind of other appetizers or any other kind of any party you might have even the Super Bowl or whatever you're doing this always goes over good so y'all have to make these okay the onion's been cooking for a couple minutes and I'm going to add a good tablespoon of minced garlic and I'm going to let this cook for about a minute and you're going to need to have a third of a cup I'm using beef stock you can use chicken stock you can even use maybe your your favorite cooking wine but you just need a third of a cup and that's what we're going to use to deglaze the the pan so let's let this cook for about one minute okay I think our garlic and onion have cooked long enough now we're going to take our one third cup of beef stock whatever you got let that kind of just deglaze the pan a little bit now I'm going to add about a half a teaspoon of black pepper a little bit of salt you don't want it too salty just salt it to your taste probably about half a teaspoon and then I'm going to take about a half a teaspoon of dry thyme now we're just going to let this cook for a little bit and we're going to cook our cook our broth down while there's just a little bit of broth left in there I'm going to go ahead and put my mushroom stems that I chopped up go ahead and put all those in there because this is just what makes part of your filling for your mushrooms and I'm going to let those cook down I think I'll put just a little bit of salt on top of those not much and I'm just going to continue to let this cook just a couple of minutes about medium medium low now most of our stock has cooked down or wine or whatever you choose to use and see how it's cooked down quite a bit just mushroom stems have cooked up everything's looking good and smelling really good now what I'm going to do is we're going to put our half a pound of Italian mild sausage back in here and like I said you can use any kind that you want and use the hot and spicy the sweet whatever it's just up to your liking I'm gonna put this in here I'm gonna turn my stove off I'm gonna put this on a plate and let it pull down just enough for me to handle because we have a little bit more to mix in with this filling before we stuff our mushrooms smelling really good in here okay let's get the rest of our filling together this is eight ounces of cream cheese and I've got one egg and I've got three fourths cup of a good shredded mozzarella or parmesan I'm sorry now I'm going to take my hand mixer and I'm going to mix this up really good okay we're going to get our meat mixture I'll let it cool down just a little bit we're going to put it in here with our cream cheese mixture now once I get this stirred up good and get it combined good I'm going to put it in the refrigerator I'm going to cover it and put it in the refrigerator for about an hour I want this mixture to firm up a little bit before we stuff our mushrooms and cook them because if you don't sometimes what they'll do is your mixture will just run all over and you know over the sides of your mushrooms so this makes for a better prettier stuffed mushroom so I'm just going to try to fold the meat and the cream cheese together this is so good y'all this same meat mixture can be used inside a manicotti no pasta be good for a lot of different pasta dishes um now at this point if you want to you could freeze this filling and then thaw it out in your refrigerator when you wanted to stuff your mushrooms but even better than that you can go ahead and fill your mushrooms flash freeze them like I'm doing my sausage balls and then wrap them up put them in a bag and then cook them and I'll have I'll have that down in the description box how you would do if they come out of the freezer frozen there's just so much prep work to do ahead that when it comes time for your party or your christmas eve dinner or your your christmas dinner or whatever you've got so much done and all you have to do is take your stuff out of the freezer or refrigerator and bake them less stress and less mess so anyways I'm gonna cover this let it sit for about an hour then we'll come back and we'll fill our mushrooms okay I honestly believe that this has set up really good it's not been in there an hour probably about 45 minutes but it looks good looks good and set up in the refrigerator and I'm just taking a teaspoon and I'm going to take my mushrooms I'm just going to kind of put it down in the mushroom kind of push it down but I'm going to kind of mound it up on top too now some of these mushrooms are they're all different sizes for sure but your fillings should still cook at the same time no matter what size should be fine now this will be um this makes a really good hearty appetizer that's for sure sometimes there's that appetizer that's just a light little appetizer that kind of gets you through and then there's some appetizers that are really really fill into your belly almost like eating a full meal sometimes especially when you sit down you've got a plate full of appetizers like I do there's so many different appetizers out there I have got so many recipes on appetizers this is a little bitty one right here you can take your time with them and make them look really pretty I like all the different dips and stuff too I have a really good recipe for spinach dip that I like now a lot of people like the spinach and artichoke dip I'm not real big on artichokes but a lot of people really like them I might do a video on my spinach dip and show you how I serve it if y'all'd like to see that I found um I haven't done this yet but I've been kind of want to I found a recipe if you've got it like a Christmas party you're going to and you're going to be serving several people this is four different dips and it's made on a big sheet pan and it's surrounded by um rolls that you would use to dip your different dips with and I thought you know that's really that's really neat I like that idea and then I got to looking at the recipes and all four of the dips were really good recipes if I have time I might do that recipe because it'd be a good one to take to a party that you're going to have several people at that you need quite a bit of dips and stuff for now I would love to do my recipe on my party wings it's a different recipe but anytime I take them anywhere people really love them and it's really it's an easy recipe the wings are not deep fried they are cooked in the oven where a lot of your say your hot wings and stuff they're deep fried first but these are not they're real they're just a real good wing if I get time I'll do that if y'all like to see that you know wings are hard to find anymore chicken wings and you know I can laugh about it because used to people my age will know this that chicken wings used to be a cheap meal it was the one of cheapest part of the chickens you could buy besides the legs well super bowl you know come along and all the different hot wings and stuff with that and as years went on chicken wings got higher and higher which is ridiculous because there really ain't much on them but still we love them and we'll eat a plate full of them that's for sure I'm trying to get these done so we can get them in the oven and like I said we talked about before you can fill your mushrooms up just like I'm doing here and before you don't bake them but flash freeze them which means to put them on a cookie sheet separated put them in your freezer and flash freeze them real quick till they're totally frozen and then you can bag them up and then when you want to serve them you just take them out and put them in the oven we're all about thinking ahead and planning ahead when it comes to these holidays and the parties and the get-togethers that's for sure okay that's all I'm going to do right now I'm going to freeze the rest of my filling and I'll use it probably Christmas Eve I'm going to take a little bit more parmesan just to put on top y'all know I like to gild the lily go the extra that little bit of extra mile there some of them are big and some are little that's okay I got a 350 oven we're going to put them in there and cook them for I'm going to say anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes and we'll see how long it takes our mushrooms have been in here about 25 minutes and I'm going to put them under the broiler and I'm going to brown them real good so here's our mushrooms out of the oven I'm putting it under the broiler for just a couple maybe a minute you see some of the juices has come out of the mushroom so I'm going to get them off here and get them on a different plate we're going to let them cool off just a little minute and then we're going to taste one okay all of our appetizers are done and looking good tasting good we've got our Italian stuffed mushrooms we've got our everything bagel seasoning on our cream cheese celery and crackers and then we got our sausage balls and I think Mr. Brown's has come in he's been sneaking some of them so do you like the appetizers Mr. Brown yes you're like me I got in very late tonight well you can eat all these just to eat all you want but yeah they're always good so good yeah you like the sausage balls don't you and the mushrooms are really good yeah they are they're good I'm fixing to eat on some of them too so anyways I hope y'all like this video and we got more coming so y'all come back and see us god bless everybody