Category: Appetizers
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Tomato Head’s Chicken Enchilada Dip
Ingredients 2 packs Frontera Enchilada Sauce 2 oz Cream Cheese at room temperature 1/2 tsp Salt ¼ tsp Cayenne Pepper ¾ tsp Cumin 2 tsp Light Brown Sugar 4 cups Cooked & Shredded Chicken 1.5 cups Frozen Corn Kernels 2 cup shredded Monterey Jack or Mild Cheddar Heat the enchilada sauce in a 10-inch cast…
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Deviled Eggs
My relationship with eggs is a Facebook status: It’s complicated. And like many a well-documented social media bond, my affair with eggs has always been mercurial and overly sensitive to the delicate shadings of status updates. Today, I’m a fan of eggs of all sorts – boiled, deviled, poached and even shirred. But it’s been…
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Spinach Artichoke Dip
The artichoke is good bud. Like capers and Brussels sprouts, the part of the artichoke that we eat is the yet-to-flower bud of the plant – that will make perfect sense if you’ll pick up an artichoke and take a look. In this case the plant in question is a member of the thistle family…
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Cheese Straws
I do not often think of myself as a Southerner. It’s not prejudicial – I am fond of the South in many ways and often eat and cook like a Southerner ought to do. I’ve grown okra, I can tie up a tomato, I know how to make a fair tea cake, I prefer my…
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Guacamole
Juliet famously pined, “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.” Of course she was considering handsome young Romeo whose family name represented an ancient feud and was, one might say, the Hatfield to her McCoy. But names matter, at least in some matters they…
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Turnip Soup
As far as I can tell, there are still people who don’t quite know what to do with a turnip. Turnip greens have a more certain presence for Southern eaters, but the bulbous root itself doesn’t seem to command a great deal of attention. And when it does find its way into the average pot,…
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Watermelon Salsa
The passing of summer always makes me sad – not for the end of sultry days and blinding sun, of course, but for the end of market days and backyard harvests, of warm tomatoes and sweet corn. Even so, I am made equally happy for the first sweet smell of autumn when I find it…
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Trifecta of Food Holidays
3 is a magical number. In Roman and Chinese systems, it’s one of the few numbers that’s written with as many strokes as the number represents. It’s a significant number to Christians, Hindus, Pagans, and Pythagoras, too. In less consecrated ways, those who fancy a flutter on the gee-gees on Derby Day or anytime Keeneland…
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Valentines Day at Tomato Head
For some of us, Valentine’s Day elicits a cynical response. It’s a holiday of strange expectations, most of which fail – often miserably. In the spirit of those failures, I admitted to a friend that I had once received an electric can opener as a Valentine. She laughed and replied that she had once gotten…
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Happy New Year!
Whenever I think about superstition, my mind almost always turns first to Tom Sawyer. He and his gang were fierce believers in this almost practical magic that relates certain behaviors to otherwise unrelated outcomes: dead cats and a special chant will cure warts, a dog’s howl signals death, and an inch worm found on the…