Yankee Magazine’s Amy Traverso shows you how to make bacon-wrapped stuffed dates, a crispy, sweet appetizer. Recipe:
Bacon-Wrapped Stuffed Dates
Hi, I’m Amy Traverso, Lifestyle Editor at Yankee Magazine, and welcome to The Yankee Kitchen. Today I am making a fantastic appetizer. A great holiday appetizer but really a great anytime appetizer. It’s bacon-wrapped stuffed dates. It’s just a few ingredients, and they are so, so good. They’ll be the hit of your party, and you can make them in advance.
So all I have here is about eight ounces of goat cheese and some fresh rosemary. I’m just going to stir that in, and this will be the filling for the dates. Now, over here, I have some bacon that I par-cooked, which means that I cooked it just a little bit of the way until it looked translucent but not yet brown. All you have to do to make this appetizer, you fill these dates with the cheese mixture. You wrap them in the bacon, and then you broil them until the bacon is nice and brown. That’s it, you’re done.
I’m going to start stuffing these. It takes a few minutes. This is the only time consuming part. Okay, so my dates are full here, and now I’m just going to roll them up in the bacon. So easy. You take a piece, you wrap it around, and then you just secure it with a toothpick. Just remember to take out the toothpicks before you serve.
Okay. So that’s it. I’m going to bring these over to the broiler and broil them on high for about three minutes per side.
Okay, so they’re all done. I got them out of the broiler. The bacon kind of shrinks down and crisps up around the dates. Then I took the toothpicks out, always important. Now they’re ready to serve. You can serve them warm or at room temperature, so you can make them ahead of time.
Now for this and for other great holiday appetizer recipes, you can go to YankeeMagazine.com.
Amy Traverso
Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee magazine and co-host of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with WGBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.
More by Amy Traverso