Budget gifts: Barton Cheese Balls

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This in from Denise Sloan of Barton Healthcare:

Here’s an easy, tasty one – the amazing, famous Barton Auxiliary Cheese Balls, which are still available, and whose secret ingredients are still secret. No one can keep a secret like an Auxiliary member.

I actually volunteered one year to help “make” the cheese balls, hoping to learn the secret herb or spice – but it was just that, making the balls: Rolling the creamy, cheesy, goofy stuff into a ball and rolling it in chopped nuts.

The Auxiliary Cheese Balls are $7.50, available the next two Wednesdays in the Barton Hospital Gift Shop from 1-8pm and new this year is a Cheese Ball Cook Book, also $7.50.

So many people have used the tangy cheese balls for more than an appetizer on a cracker that the Auxiliary members collected dozens of recipes in which the cheese balls are featured and made their own Cheese Ball Cook Book. For $15 you have a two-for gift under $20.

Someone, somewhere must have the famous Cheese Ball recipe written down. Surely, the dear Auxiliary members won’t take that secret to their graves?

Pearl Parks has been Cheese Ball chairwomen forever and she must have that closely held secret recipe in a safe deposit box. Pearl will agree with me, it’s not Christmas without an Auxiliary Cheese Ball at the buffet – and Christmas calories don’t count.