These come from my Aunt Kathryn, who is always sending me great, not-too-complicated recipes to try.  She always especially has delicious finger food.  Our extended family gatherings are often at her house, and she served these cheese biscuits at our Christmas gift exchange a few years ago.  I try to keep the ingredients for these on hand, as they come together pretty quickly.  They also freeze well, so I usually freeze half the batch for a night when I need a before-dinner snack.

Cheese Date Biscuits

1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1/2 c sharp cheddar cheese
1 1/2 c all purpose flour
1/2 t cayenne pepper
1/2 t salt
1/4 c milk
1 8 ox package chopped dates

Preheat oven to 375 F.

Beat butter and cheese until well-blended. Mix in flour, salt,and pepper. Add milk. Stir until stiff dough forms. Wrap 1 T dough around 3-4 chopped dates. Cover completely and form into a cylinder or a ball.

Place on an ungreased baking sheet. Bake until golden, about fifteen minutes. Serve warm.

Note: If you want to freeze them, bake for about 12-13 minutes and then freeze. Bake for 2-3 minutes (straight from the freezer) to reheat. You can also make the dough up to one day ahead, and keep in the fridge until ready to bake.

More from melting your mouth:
Cheese Straws

So anyway, I promise that pimento cheese is much tastier than it might look in the above photo. If you’re not a Southerner, you may not have heard of this spread, which is extremely easy to make, and is a pretty yummy snack. Since we’ve been exercising more, we’ve found the need to keep more quick and easy snacks or meals on hand, so I made a batch last week. We like to use it to fill celery sticks (so you can tell yourself you’re balancing out the healthiness of mixing cheese with mayo), or spread it on sandwiches. If you’re going to put it on a sandwich, I think it’s much, much better if you toast the sandwich (in a toaster oven, already filled with the spread, so the cheese gets gooey and melty), but there are those in my family that disagree and think it’s better without toasting. Either way, you should give it a try, as it takes all of 10 minutes to whip up a batch.

Pimento Cheese

small jar of pimento peppers
1 lb. medium cheddar cheese (Apparently my grandmother always used blocks of American cheese, but I think I probably prefer the sharper taste of cheddar)
sugar
mayonnaise

Chop pimenotos (I use my food processor). Sprinkle with sugar, a couple tablespoons or so. Add very finely grated cheese. (I use my food processor to grate the cheese onto the pimentos, and then, since I don’t have a fine enough chopping blade, I stick the regular blade back in there and chop it up more finely.) Transfer to a bowl, and mix in some mayonnaise, just enough to hold everything together. (This was probably a few tablespoons or so of mayo, I’m not exactly sure). Spread on crackers, celery sticks, or make into sandwiches.

I think this is the longest gap in posting I’ve had, at least in a good while, and I’m sorry. What can I say — we’ve been traveling a lot (the summer of 5 weddings is now done. phew!), I’ve been pretty busy at work, we’re trying to train for a triathlon in September, I’ve been sick for the past several days, and our camera has pooped out on us so we haven’t really been able to take pictures of what little we have been cooking! Basically, life gets in the way.

Anyway, I did still have a couple of things saved up from before the camera started screwing up, so hopefully I can now get back on the ball and these will tide me over until we can get the camera fixed!

So no more of this whining about being busy — let’s talk about pizza! Grilled pizza is something we tried for the first time on the weekend of a thousand posts I keep talking about. I have to admit, my parents’ pizza oven back in Raleigh has pretty well spoiled me for pizza. It took a few years, but they really have it down pat now and make some pretty excellent pizza. I’ve occasionally made pizza on our pizza stone (thanks, Saket!) in the oven, but it’s never quite as good as I want it to be. However, grilling pizza is really the way to go to me. This makes a nice crispy crust, seemed to be pretty forgiving if you’re not able to get the crust as thin as you’d like (that’s me!), and cooks everything pretty fast which is nice for making a lot of different types of pizza to please everyone. I’m not trying to say it’s as good as wood-fired, but it might start to be on the same spectrum, and if you’re 3,000 miles away from the pizza oven you’re used to, it makes a pretty darn good substitute.

For the dough, I of course used a recipe from my mom, which she in turn got from the folks over at Mugnaini, where they bought their pizza oven. She has done a lot of experimenting with pizza dough recipes over the year, and this one is her favorite. The topping combinations listed at the bottom are also some of the favorites my parents have refined. What do you like on your pizza? I’d always love to hear your suggestions in the comments!

Grilled Pizza

We use the recipe from Mugnaini pizza dough, which you can get from that link, enough for 6-8 pizzas. I’ve got the ingredients list below, but I’ll let you read her instructions, and I’ll pick up on what I did after making the dough.

Mom thinks that having nice flour really makes a difference in how easy the dough is to work with. She recommends Giusto’s High Performance Pizza Flour, which you can buy online (another trick she learned from Mugnaini cooking school — do you see a trend here? I promise they aren’t paying me anything!).

4 c flour
1 t salt
1 1/2 c warm water
2 t yeast dissolved in 1/4 c warm water

Making the dough: Follow the instructions for making the dough you can find here, all the way through. You will then end up with 6 or 8 balls of dough. (Basically you are going to mix everything together and knead, let it rise for 2.5-3 hours, cut it into balls, and let it rest another 20 minutes.)

Par-baking: If I’m going to grill the pizzas, I then par-bake the dough. To do this, turn the oven on as high as it will go (for me that’s 525) and place a pizza stone in the oven.

Roll or stretch out the crusts. (I’m hoping to persuade my mom to do a more detailed instructional post with me on this one. Throwing around pizza dough like the professionals is much harder than it looks, and she’s much better at it than I am! You can leave her comments here to urge her to participate in this effort. )

Once the oven is hot, slide the rolled/stretched out dough onto the pizza stone. Let it bake just a couple minutes, flip it, bake it a couple minutes more, and pull it out of the oven. The idea here is to only barely bake the dough, making it a lot easier to work with when you put it on the grill. This is also nice for entertaining because you can take care of all the messy dough-making before people come over. The crusts can even be frozen for a few weeks after they are par-baked as well.

Grilling: To grill the pizza, first start a medium-high to high fire in the grill (we used charcoal, which I think adds to the flavor). Top the par-baked crusts however you like. Slip the crust directly onto the grill rack and cover. Grill about 10 minutes, until the cheese is melted and the crust is done but not burned on the bottom. (Keep an eye on them. They may cook more quickly/slowly depending on your fire, and honestly, we didn’t time it, so we’re going on our memory from a few weeks ago here.)

Topping Ideas:

• White pizza (first one shown above)

Combine 1 T chopped fresh basil, 1 T dried oregano, 6 minced cloves of garlic, and 1/2 t ground black pepper. (This make enough for more than one pizza.) Spread dough with olive oil then herbs. Top with shredded mozzarella cheese, thinly sliced fontina cheese, and grated parmesan cheese. We often add chopped prosciutto and/or pine nut, too. Possibly my favorite kind of pizza!

• Pesto Chicken (second one shown above)

Top with pesto sauce, grilled chicken, feta cheese, pine nuts, and parmesan. Bacon is also a good addition.

• More delicious pizza ideas from Melting Your Mouth