Fresh Food Friday - "Cheese wad" Edition

We're back this week, on another recipe walk through! Still trucking through Trisha Yearwood's "Georgia Cooking in a Oklahoma Kitchen", working on her Ranch Dressing Cheeseball this week, or as the header notes affectionatly describe it, the "cheese wad". Story goes, her sister made this recipe once, but didn't get the quantities exactly right, which made it more like a "wad" than a spread, and "cheese wad" was what their dad always called it afterwards.

Aaah, dads. Am I right?!

As always, as this recipe isn't legally mine, I can't reproduce it, but Food Network can!

So, these are the usual suspects:

Cheese, cream cheese, and mayo. The holy trinity. Or something.

At any rate, the gist is room temperature cream cheese and cheese, mix them up. So this recipe starts out, as almost all the recipes we've been through together so far have, looking like this:

Cream cheese. Shredded cheese, you know the drill. Now, for this one, I didn't make the entire recipe. Or, I didn't set out to. I basically ended up doing it. At any rate, I didn't use the whole envelope of ranch dressing, I just took a table spoon out of it, and it was still a TON of ranch flavor. Like, a ton.

I didn't show buttermilk in the picture (because pro tip? Use regular milk, whatever you've got in the house, and a splash of vinegar. Performs just like buttermilk in cooking), but after you get the entire mixture put together:

And you mix it:

You wrap in plastic wrap, and put it in the freezer to set. Or, if you're like me, you put it in the freezer to set, eat dinner, watch the entirety of the Bruce Jenner Interview on ABC, and then go "Aww, man! Cheese ball!" In which case, you remove the now frozen cheese mixture from your freezer, allow it to thaw until it's pliable, and then form into balls.

Decorate with the pecans, and serve!

Ta-daaaaah! Cheese ball!

The cheese mixture is actually very good, for as strange as it sounded like it was (I know when I think "cream cheese", my second thought is not typically "Ooh, I could go for mayo!"). But I halved the ranch seasoning, and still ended up with way too much ranch dressing flavoring in this. You need much, much less ranch dressing flavoring than this recipe calls for!

As for the picky eater test, my son had already gone to bed by the time I was done, but I got my husband to try it. He went "Hey, that's pretty good, for all the ranch dressing flavor..." Since it is fresh, I'm hoping that flavor mellows some, but yowza. That's some serious ranch, y'all.

Like these recipe walk throughs? Me too! I've done others!

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