Easy Appetizers for Christmas or Anytime - Stress-Free Christmas Appetizers and Savory Snacks

Hey friends, it's Mel. Merry Christmas and welcome to my channel. If you need some quick party food, appetizers, savory treats, you've come to the right place. Tonight, we're gonna start with a new recipe. It's taco ranch biscuit bites. This is one pound of ground beef that I have just cooked up and drained all of my grease off of. Into this, you're gonna add in one can of Rotel undrained. Then you're gonna add in one envelope of taco seasoning. You want to mix that into your ground beef and add about a third of a cup of water. Let it get all incorporated and then just let it simmer and cook down a little bit. After all of that is incorporated well, I'm just gonna move it over to another bowl and into that, I'm gonna add in one cup of just regular bottled ranch dressing and two cups of shredded cheddar cheese. I was making this for a women's Christmas party at church and this was when my oven was still on the fritz, so I'm just making up my mixture ahead of time and I'm gonna take it to church with me and prepare it the rest of the way there. And thank you for all your concern about my oven. My new control panel board came in and my husband got me back to cooking in no time. You're gonna bake these up in a mini muffin pan and I'm taking a roll of just the 10 small biscuits. Could not find the flaky layers. They would have come in half easily, but I'm gonna work with what I have and I'm just tearing them in half and then forming them into a little biscuit and putting them down into this muffin tin. Then you're just gonna go over the top with a big spoonful of your meat and cheese mixture. This made plenty. I had another roll of biscuits that I did not prepare this night, but I made them up later in the week for our family at home and I still had a quart size freezer bag full of this mixture where I can make this again. And you'll see when you bake them up here, I really overfilled and I had plenty of the mixture left, but you do bake it about 10 to 15 minutes in a 375 degree oven. This was so delicious. The taco seasoning and the ranch together gives a wonderful flavor and the little bit of tomato in the Rotel, all the ladies love this. And like I said, I made it later that week for my family and they loved it as well. And they're so cute with the little biscuit bottoms. Now we're gonna make a super easy three ingredient sausage ball recipe. You start out with this baking mix. I have the Great Value brand. This is just like Bisquick and there's so many neat things you can do with this if you've never used it before. I'm just showing you the back of the box. You can make biscuits, pancakes, all kinds of recipes. Into this, we're gonna put one pound of just regular sausage and we have two cups of shredded cheddar cheese in the bowl. The hardest part of this recipe is just mixing everything together. And I like to put some gloves on and let my sausage come up a little bit to room temperature and I'll begin mixing my cheese into my sausage before I ever start adding the baking mix. And I'll just pour it in a little bit at a time and start combining. You can use a stand mixer or if you have dough hooks on your hand mixer. I tried that one time. It works good, I guess, but I just like to do it with my hands. I felt like I get a little better incorporation of it that way. This is a very basic, simple recipe. I make these every year and I make them numerous times throughout the year, just not at Christmas. They're a wonderful appetizer. They're also just good to have for a quick breakfast. But you can see how this stuff will get in the bottom of the bowl and then I just pour it back up over the sausage. And finally, you get one large sausage ball. And I am just gonna pull little small pieces off and roll them around to the little ball. I like mine rather small. They're not teeny tiny, but they're not like a golf ball size. They're smaller than that. You can see this makes a good amount of sausage balls here. The smaller pan I'm gonna bake up for us to eat that night. And the larger pan, I'm gonna put it in my freezer and flash freeze it for a couple hours so they won't stick together. And then I'll pull them out and put them in a baggie and I'll just have them ready for Christmas or for whenever I wanna pull them out. And here you can see they're frozen up and I've just got my instructions, which is 15 to 20 minutes on 350 degrees. And when you pull them out from frozen, you can just set them on your pan and by the time the oven preheats, they are ready to go in even from frozen and they bake up wonderful. There's something very nostalgic and comforting about sausage balls to me. The cheese and the Bisquick. I think anything with Bisquick, I just love. But this is something that growing up, we really only had this at Christmas. And so I have just come to associate it with Christmas parties. Next recipe I'm gonna show you is kind of a funny name, but I think you'll enjoy it and it is delicious. We call it infant CPR. It's my husband's favorite. Tonight, we're gonna make my husband's favorite little appetizer. I got this many, many years ago from the wife of one of his friends at work. She made this and he loved it. And you put it on these little cocktail breads. Now, normally you can find these like in the bakery deli area. He likes rye and I just happened to have this in my freezer from last year and it's a good thing because I just have not been able to find this cocktail bread anywhere this year. I haven't looked at Aldi, but it also comes in wheat and pumpernickel, but this is what you put it on. You need two pounds of sausage, but I am halving it. So I'm just doing one pound of regular sausage. Normally you would do a pound of hot and a pound of mild. Gonna use about a teaspoon of Italian seasoning. And if you were doing the whole recipe, you would use this whole two pounds of Velveeta. So I'm just gonna use half of this, but we really don't know a name for this. I guess I would call it sausage and Velveeta toast or maybe cocktail toast. But around here, we all know it as infant CPR. I wrote this little recipe down. I called my husband's friend. I called his wife to get this recipe and I wrote it down on this infant CPR pamphlet that I had in my purse. So the kids think it was so funny when I pulled this out. Years later, they saw this and they're like, what is, or is that mom? I said, it's just a recipe. And honestly, I know it by heart now. It's two pounds of sausage, two pounds of Velveeta cheese. You cook the sausage, put the cheese in, add your Italian seasoning, put it on these toast and bake it at 400 for about 10 minutes. That's all there is to it. But the kids at church and everybody loves this and they all ask for it by infant CPR. So this recipe is especially for them and I promised that I would share with you guys how this recipe got its name. So here we have our Christmas infant CPR appetizer tonight. You can see me just finishing off my sausage and I'm beginning to cube up my Velveeta cheese to go into the pan with the sausage. This is another recipe that makes quite a bit. I'm just prepping my pan with the little toast over here. I do continue to blot the grease out of my sausage after I've drained it because that sausage just kept rendering grease. And I'm gonna put in my Italian seasoning and I just kind of eyeball this. Then I just begin adding the chunks of Velveeta a little at a time. I have this on like a medium low heat. You'll see it begin to soften up and melt and I just keep stirring it around in there and eventually you will get to a place where it's all melted down and incorporated. And I keep blotting the grease up just because you know, you just need to do that. But here it is all fixed up and ready to go on the toast and there comes a batch right out of the oven. Of course, in my normal fashion, I have overfilled these but that mixture makes so much. On this rest of the toast that I baked up, I didn't put quite as much. My husband enjoys this at lunch, breakfast, anytime. That weekend, I made him three big fried eggs and about six pieces of this warmed up and he enjoyed that so much. He's still eating on these. And last but not least is Czech's Party Mix. This is my personal favorite. Here are the things that I put in mine and basically the seasonings are always the same but you can mix it up with whatever you like to go in yours. I'm starting with three cups of wheat Czech's mix and this is the original measurements to make one run of this but I have enough to go ahead and do two. I'm using Crispix which has rice on one side and corn on the other and you would use six cups of this. If you had the individual Czech cereals, you would use three cups of each of those and I was showing you at first the measurements but then I just began to eyeball it and you'd use about a cup and a half of nuts. So I'm using about a cup of cashews and I know I will go back with the rest of those and also almonds. And as far as nuts, this is what I put in ours because this is what we love. And I always use more nuts than what's called for anyway because that's how we like it. And then I see I'm gonna have plenty more nuts left over and cereal to do the second run and I have decided to make it all in this one huge pan. So I just eyeballed me, six more cups of that Crispix which finished it off and here comes three cups of the wheat Chex again and that finished that off. And I decided to throw in a few Cheez-Its since I had them but I didn't want many because I don't like the Cheez-Its to over power the nut and the Chex. That's my favorite part. So I put in the rest of the almonds and I had another bag of cashews. Now for the seasoning mixture, since I've doubled it, I'm using a full cup which is two sticks of butter and then Lowry seasoning salt. I'm gonna be putting in three teaspoons of this. Garlic powder, I will be using one and a half teaspoons of this and then a whole teaspoon of onion powder. For the Worcestershire sauce, I will be using four big tablespoons of this. Like I said, I did double this recipe. I will leave you a link to the original recipe in the description box but as you can see, I make this my own and you should too. I mean, it is a party mix. So have fun with it. And I just pour the seasonings over the top of this and then I take a very light spatula and gently stir all of my cereal and nuts together and I do this in three stages before I get started just to make sure everything is coated very well and the bulk of this recipe is stirring your ingredients. So you wanna be very careful. Like I said, I have this really large spatula but it's very light and you want to be light handed with this so you don't break up all of your cereal. So once I have all of my seasoning mixture coated onto my cereal, you're gonna put it in a 250 degree oven, set you a timer and you're gonna cook it an hour but every 15 minutes, you're gonna pull it out and stir it ever so lightly. So you'll do that at 15 minutes, 30 minutes and 45 minutes. Then your last 15 minutes, you pull it out and give it a final stir and you're gonna lay it out to dry. I just like to cover my entire stove with paper towels. I do have a child that has cashew and nut allergies so I like to keep everything contained and don't worry, she was away for the weekend. I just don't even make this when she's in the house. It's okay to have it stored here but I don't like to make her uncomfortable and you can see the bountiful harvest that we have. This is so good, this is my favorite. I like to have plenty to share when everybody's here and like I said, I like to make it when she's not at home and I just make plenty of it. I hope that these little quick and easy salty, savory snacks have helped you out this year. I will have you a link to my Christmas playlist at the end of this video if you need any other sweet treats. I will not have a what's for dinner next week but I will have a special video on Tuesday and a little something for you on Christmas Eve. Thank you so much, friends, for a great year and I look forward to seeing you in the new year. I'll take a little bit of time off and I'll be back with lots of great new content for you. I hope that you have a very merry Christmas and a very happy new year and I send you love as always from my kitchen.