Strawberry Cream Cheese

My husband is not an adventurous eater.  When he finds something he likes, he sticks with it and rarely deviates.  Take bagels for instance.  He likes sesame seed bagels with strawberry cream cheese.  I buy the bagels at Panera Bread and, until recently, I bought the cream cheese at the grocery store.

Now, I've been a label reader for years.  I normally check the ingredients on everything before I buy it.  I never worried about the strawberry cream cheese because all it should contain is cream cheese and strawberries, right?   Nope.  Silly me to trust a multinational food mega-conglomerate to have my best interests in mind.  I found that the most popular brand of this cream cheese contains not only the food dye Red 40, but the artificial preservative sorbic acid, as well!

Time to make my own.  After all, I've been making yogurt for years. I wrote about that in this post:  Making Yogurt.  How hard could it be to make strawberry cream cheese?  As it turns out, not difficult at all.  Here's how.

Buy a block of plain cream cheese and let it sit at room temperature until it is softened.  Hunk it up and put it in a food processor.

Add a few frozen strawberries that have been thawed.

Then add 2 - 3 tablespoons powdered sugar.

Process it until it is the consistency you like.

Put it in an air-tight container and store in the frig.

This is so much better tasting than the store-bought kind and one bag of frozen strawberries makes several batches.  Come to think about it, I have never checked the ingredients on frozen strawberries.  Surely they only contain strawberries?  Sigh.  I better go check.