Meal No. 1369: Savory Garlic Beef & Broccoli Turnovers

It's been years since friend and colleague Leslie Martin has come over to the house, and the dinner visit this past Thursday night was long, long overdue. It's my fault: she's promised to be here if I'd just send her the dates that worked best, and I repeatedly failed to get that ball rolling. Leslie definitely appreciates how much this house has been transformed by all the work that I've had done to it. She knew what it looked like when I first bought it in 2003.

For dinner that night, we had a terrific dish created by Kirsten Shabaz, as part of a Philadelphia Cream Cheese promotion, if I remember correctly. I stumbled across it in an issue of Taste of Home, which almost always then makes its recipes available via their website. This one isn't, though. Instead, to access the original, you might look at a reposting of it on food.com.

On the Kraft website, it's been reworked to account for the unavailability of the savory garlic cooking creme that's no longer marketed. I don't like that Kirsten's name has been completely removed from authorship, though. And quite frankly, I prefer the DIY cooking creme recipe that I've posted down below.

I guess the recipes that Kirsten and other women created back in 2010 or 2011 were supposed to boost the demand for the short-lived "cooking cremes" that were so briefly in grocery stores. Kraft seems to recognize that people still yearn for them, even though they were an unsuccessful venture in the Philadelphia line, and they finally put up this Tumblr page to help people craft (ha!) them at home.

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"Savory Garlic Beef & Broccoli Turnovers," by Kirsten Renee Shabaz of Minneapolis, MN. Taste of Home, November 2011, p. 31. (Go to food.com for a copy of the original recipe.)

"DIY Cooking Creme," from Finding Joy in My Kitchen, 25 May 2011.