5 Ingredients or Fewer

Belgian Endive with Blue Cheese Spread

September  9, 2012
5
5 Ratings
  • Serves a crowd.. or less
Author Notes

Is this a recipe or just an after thought?

I was looking for a way to add a light-ish salad-like appetizer to a Thanksgiving menu a few years ago as a foil to the heavier food to come. I had years ago (like thirty... or is it forty? oh dear.) made a ridiculously fussy, somewhat silly, but memorable recipe of endive and gorgonzola where you separated the leaves of the endive and then reconstructed it with some kind of gorgonzola based mixture between the leaves. You then sliced through making very pretty flower-like rounds. But, well, never again.

Serving endive leaves as crackers and making a spread of ricotta and roquefort seemed all these years later more likely to happen.... and it did.. and it is refreshingly simple to make and pretty refreshingly good to eat. It has become a fall-back recipe for hastily thrown together cocktail parties or pot lucks.

I'm sure there are dozens of variations.... other cheeses, other herbs, other spices. —Jane Fordyce

What You'll Need
Ingredients
  • 16 ounces container of favorite ricotta cheese
  • Piece roquefort or other favorite blue-veined cheese
  • 6 or 8 belgian endives, red or green or mixed
  • salt and pepper
Directions
  1. Adding a little blue cheese at a time, tasting as you go, mix it into the ricotta until you get a balance you like. I like it to definitely taste like blue cheese and yet still have a strong presence of ricotta. I use Calabro brand ricotta, usually whole milk.
  2. Add salt and freshly coarse-ground pepper to taste.
  3. Rinse the endives and pull apart the leaves until they get so tiny they are obviously too small to hold anything.
  4. Serve the leaves in a big heap along side the cheese mixture with a small spoon or cheese spreader.
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