An edible gift to you for the holidays!

This is not my recipe. I got the idea from a wine tasting put on by a local wine shop. These tasty morsels go great with your favorite nice white wine. See the pictures below to see the process and what they look like.

The ingredients are simple. You need good quality seedless grapes of whatever variety you choose. I chose these dark blue grapes. You also need goat cheese. And you need pistachio nuts. I chose to make half of my batch with cashews.

The first thing you need is cleanliness. Make sure you wash your hands thoroughly and don’t re-contaminate them by doing something thoughtless like rubbing your eyes, nose or whatever. Make sure your fingernails are clean too. Of course, all surfaces and tools should also be…clean. Duh.

Each individual grape should be cleaned and dry. For each grape, you need approximately an equal or slightly larger volume of goat cheese. The goat cheese needs to be at room temperature to work and stick properly, but don’t worry too much about it since it will absorb the heat from your hands anyway. So basically all you do is mold the cheese around the grape until it is a smooth covering. Roll it around in your palms if that helps.

Then you place them individually on a plate and refrigerate them until just before you need to serve them up. This is so the nuts don’t become too soggy and also if you refrigerate before rolling them in the nuts they are easier to handle. EDIT: I just found out that the nuts don’t stick very well if the goat cheese is too cold/hard. They must be rolled while the cheese is at room temperature. THEN refrigerate them. Hey, I’ve never actually made these before!

So, you have to shell some pistachios, or buy some already shelled and crush them into a coarse powder in a mortar and pestle. If you don’t know what a mortar and pestle is, you should probably stick to fast food at your local McDonald’s.

Then you roll the grape balls in the nuts to coat them. Stick a toothpick in it and you are done. These are meant as a sensory experience in that it is definitely not a main meal course. It’s just a taste sensation best enjoyed with white wine.

The ingredients: Grapes, Goat Cheese, Pistachios, and Cashews.

Rolling the goat cheese onto the grape...

Rolling the grape-cheese ball into the coarse pistachio powder...

On the right, a pistachio coated cheese grape thingy, on the left, (OPTIONAL ha ha) some of the cheese has been wiped off so kids can get a thrill from the 'eyeball'...

The finished product, cashews on the left, pistachios on the right. I don't do the eyeball thingy, that was just an accident!

Happy Holidays!