Food: Bread, Potatoes and a Savory

Yesterday Mother made her Wheat Walnut bread. Four loaves. It's hearty, healthy, and full of walnuts. Great toasted and buttered.

 She also experimented on us yesterday with these "shingled potatoes." It's really just a funky way to prep your baked potatoes: peel off 3/4 of the skin, leaving only a wide strip along the bottom. Then thinly slice the potatoes, but not all the way through. Butter and bake. These should have been baked a bit longer, and browned a bit more. But it was a fun option. One nice thing is that you can take off as many "slices" as you want, without taking a whole baked potato.

I volunteered to take a savory finger food to Bible study tomorrow, but could not come up with a fun recipe. Then Mother handed me this one: Pineapple Cheese Ball. She says it's yummy. Here's a few pics with directions, and the recipe will be at the bottom.
Beat together the softened cream cheese and pineapple in a bowl. I did this by hand.

Add the chopped nuts, and the chopped pepper and onion. They should be cut fine. I didn't have green pepper, so I used a red one.

Here's where my camera lost about four pictures. Sigh. Anyway add the salt, and mix well. Cover and refrigerate. The idea is to get it really cold so it is easier to mold into a cheese ball (or two). But mine was rather moist (didn't drain the pineapple well enough?), so I decided to lay some cling wrap on the serving platter, scattered some more chopped nuts on the wrap, globbed the cream cheese mixture onto it, sprinkled more nuts on the sides and top, and then sealed the cling wrap up around it tightly. Call it a cheese loaf.

Then back into the refrigerator it went to mingle the flavors and chill well overnight. Tomorrow, I'll serve it with a combination of Ritz and club crackers.

Pineapple Cheese Ball
2 pkgs. (8oz. each) cream cheese
1 can (8 1/2 oz.) crushed pineapple
2 cups chopped pecans
1/4 cup chopped green pepper
2 Tbls. chopped onion
1 tsp. salt

Beat cheese; add drained pineapple, 1 cup of nuts, onion, pepper and salt. Chill to make handling easier. Shape into 2 or 3 balls and roll in the remaining nuts. Make this recipe as much as a couple of days ahead of time. May be frozen.