All posts filed under: Holiday Appetizers

Homemade Sausage Rolls

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It’s Wednesday and I am back again with another #AppyHolidays post! This week I am featuring the ultimate holiday appetizer on the blog: Sausage Rolls. Everyone loves these meaty appetizers, especially around the holidays. Not only do they taste delicious, they are super easy to make- even from scratch! Simply assemble some store bought puff pastry with ground chicken and turkey sausage and a few other festive ingredients and you’ll have a great holiday appetizer that will fly off the plate in seconds! Read on to see how I make them! For the sausage filling, I like to combine both sausage meat and ground meat in this recipe. After testing the recipe a few times, I’ve noticed that using plain sausage meat in the recipe yields really oily/soggy Sausage Rolls… which doesn’t let the puff pastry rise enough. By adding a bit of ground chicken, it absorbs some of the fat and makes the filling a bit lighter, but still super flavourful. In this recipe I like to use ground white meat chicken with spicy …

Citrus Marinated Olives

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If you are looking to make a quick and simple holiday appetizer, look no further than this recipe for Citrus Marinated Olives. I like to serve these olives year-round, but I always bring them out for the holiday season. They are the perfect little salty and briny bite that works perfectly with antipasto platters, or just on their own! Plus, they’re super easy to make! I like to use two types of olives in this recipe: Cerignola and Kalamata. Cerignola olives are from Cerignola, Italy and are actually DOP/PDO protected, meaning that this type of olive is only from this specific area or region and nowhere else in the world. The Cerignola is my absolute favourite olive since they are not too briny and are full of rich, buttery meat. They are quite a large olive too, which make them perfect for eating. Also, not only do they come in green, they also come in red (with the help of food dye) and black which is perfect for fancy get-togethers and celebrations. You will see …

Mushroom Turnovers

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It’s Wednesday and you know what that means… time for another #AppyHolidays post! This week I’m making a delicious Maltese appetizer that is guaranteed to fly off your table this holiday season: Mushroom Turnovers. This is a savoury take on the classic sweet turnover recipe, which is typically filled with fresh fruit or jam. Meaty cremini mushrooms are fried with onions and thyme and is mixed with creamy, rich sour cream. This delectable filling is then stuffed into a homemade turnover dough (that is if you can resist eating it straight from the pan!) that is made with flour, butter and ricotta cheese. The butter and ricotta cheese really make this dough light and airy yet very sturdy and able to hold the thick mushroom filling. While this recipe is quite a lot of work, the turnovers can be filled and frozen well in advance and can be cooked from frozen… which is super helpful around the holidays! Want to make this recipe yourself? See the full recipe here! Enjoy and #AppyHolidays!

Holiday Cheese Ball

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It’s finally December and I am in full holiday mode! I have all of my Christmas decorations up (actually, they’ve been up since November 12th) and I have been listening to Christmas albums, baking cookies, planning a Christmas party (stay tuned for that!), and have been drinking many cups of hot chocolate 😛 I’m 100% in the Christmas spirit! If you were following me last December you will know all about #AppyHolidays and I’m so happy to announce that it is back again this year! For those of you who don’t know about #AppyHolidays, it’s essentially a fun series that I do on my blog during December. Every Wednesday of the month I will be posting a wonderful holiday appetizer that you can make for any parties you may be hosting or are attending this season. I’m also going to throw in a few surprise/bonus posts here and there so make sure you follow along! Of course, as with all my recipes, I use the most local and seasonal ingredients that are available to make …

Crispy Baked Spring Rolls with Sweet Chili Dipping Sauce

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December is halfway over and by now, holiday parties are in full swing. My calendar is getting pretty full with parties with friends and co-workers and I am thinking of hosting a little party of my own. I admit, it’s got me a little stressed- you know with preparing host/hostess gifts, cooking food to bring, and of course, choosing the perfect party outfit (my outfit selection actually stresses me out the most). But hey, that’s the holidays! At least there is plenty of wine and cocktails to help me cope! If you have also been invited to attend or are hosting a holiday party this season, I have got you covered with my #AppyHolidays series. This Thursday I give you, Crispy Baked Spring Rolls with Sweet Chili Sauce. Don’t they look amazing? They taste good too! Now for me, the holidays aren’t complete without some sort of Asian food. I know… it’s weird. I think I may have this embedded in me since I used to work at M&M Meat Shops where we would sell hundreds of …

Stuffed Olives

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It’s Thursday, and you know what that means… it’s time for another #AppyHolidays post! For my second post I present…Stuffed Olives. I know what your’re thinking- yes I did post a Stuffed Mushrooms recipe last week, and this week I am stuffing olives- but truly anything that is stuffed tastes delicious. This recipe is made exclusively by my grandma and I cannot imagine Christmas without them. We always eat these as one of our many appetizers before our big Christmas dinner. Appetizers in the Lynn household on Christmas Day normally consist of: stuffed olives, smoked salmon with dill, a cheese board, and garden salad (the salad is there to keep the food pregame a bit healthy). Now, you can stuff olives with just about anything- pimentos, garlic, blue cheese, mozzarella etc.- and they can even be fried too. But these stuffed olives don’t play around. These olives are stuffed with a simple and straightforward mixture of garlic, parsley, breadcrumbs and olive oil and are served straight out of the fridge or at room temperature. As a …