Gooey and Cheesy Warm Bacon Dip

I'm excited to share this recipe with you because it's kind of amazing on 3 different levels.

Level one: ease.  The instructions are literally to mix everything together and then bake it.

Level 2: ingredients.  There are 5, and you probably have all of them in your fridge right now.

Level 3: (you knew this was coming) - the taste!  I'll confess that I personally haven't tried this dip due to the bacon, but I have made it 3 times so far, and every time, it has been completely devoured.  After all, the title kind of summarizes how great it is: it's gooey, it's cheesy, it's warm, and there's bacon.  Win win win.

I made this for my best friend's shower, for a birthday party, and for Kenzie to bring to her friend's shower.  Rave reviews all around.  So many people asked for the recipe, and the best part is that I can actually tell them what to do because it's just so simple.  I like to serve it with sliced baguette, but it would go great with crackers or veggies too.  It's just a super easy and yet deliciously impressive dip that should make an appearance at your next party or potluck!

Recipe:

gooey and cheesy warm bacon dip
from Kitchen Meets Girl

Ingredients:
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 cups sour cream
1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
6 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled
1/2 cup sliced green onion

Instructions:

1) Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2) Combine softened cream cheese, sour cream, cheddar cheese, bacon and green onion.  Spoon mixture into a 1-quart baking dish and bake for 25 - 35 minutes, or until cheese is bubbling and hot.

3) Serve with bread slices, crackers or veggies.

Taco Dip

I have not posted in my blog for a week, and my excuse is so pathetic: I could not for the life of me decide whether or not I wanted to share the next two recipes.  I kept going back and forth.  It has nothing to do with how delicious they were, because they were great; this one in particular was so great that I made it twice within a week.  It's because of the untimely-ness of the recipes.  Okay, here's the deal: they are  Halloween recipes.  Halloween. As in, October.  And today it's December and so far from Halloween that it's not funny.  I'm having a Christmas party tonight, for God's sake.

I've learned my lesson; I should have bumped this to the front of my recipe list and shared it at Halloween time, even though my rule is to strictly go in the oder in which I have made things.  Because when my next post is spider cookies, I will crush your Christmas spirit and disgust you with my poor planning.  Sorry.

The good news is, you can actually customize this for any holiday.  In fact I will probably be making it for tonight's Christmas craft party.  Even though the official name of it is graveyard taco dip, it doesn't have to be a graveyard!  You create the graveyard with cookie cutter cut-outs of tortillas; they get baked and crisp up and you can stand them up and make a graveyard (I made ghosts, cats, pumpkins, etcetera).  However for Christmas, you could easily make ornaments, trees, stockings, and so on.  It's really about what cookie cutters you have!  And I luckily got a box of 100 for my shower with cutters for basically every holiday, so let the taco dip reign continue!

Now let's talk about the dip itself, because it is so good.  I made it for a mini Halloween party that I had here, and then again for our work pot luck lunch; I even brought the rest of it in to my grad class and we polished it off that night.  Everyone loves it because there is so much goodness to love.  There's a layer of refried beans,  then a layer with a sour cream and taco seasoning. The third layer is my favorite: it's a super cool, creamy and delicious mixture of mashed avocado, garlic, and Greek yogurt (the original recipe called for mayonnaise and I refuse).  I could eat that layer by itself with a spoon, I swear.  The fourth layer is salsa, and then I added my own fifth layer of shredded cheese.  You can finalize the deal with some chopped scallions to make it look like grass, but if you aren't making a graveyard, it won't matter if you skip them.  This is such an easy dip to put together, but it's just so delicious.  Serve it with tortilla chip and encourage people to eat the homemade tortilla chip decorations too.

Happy Hallowchristmas!


Recipe:

taco dip
from Chickabug

Ingredients:
1 can refried beans
2 cups sour cream
1 package taco seasoning
2 avocados, mashed
2 tablespoons Greek yogurt
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup salsa
1 1/2 cups shredded cheese
1 bunch scallions, chopped
2 large tortillas for decoration

Instructions:

1) In a small bowl, mix the taco seasoning and sour cream.  In another small bowl, mix the mashed avocados, minced garlic, and mayonnaise.

2) In a small Pyrex dish or plate, layer the beans, sour cream mixture, avocado mixture, salsa, and cheese.  Sprinkle the scallions on top.

3) Chill at least an hour, or until ready to serve.  The dip can be made a day ahead and kept, covered, in the refrigerator.

4) To make the tombstones or other holiday decorations, cut the shapes you want out of tortillas.  Place the cut-out shapes on a parchment paper-lined cookie tray and bake at 350 degrees until the tortillas are nice and brown.  Add the shapes to the dip just before serving.

Roasted Tomato Almond Dip

5 minutes, and 5 ingredients.  That's all you need to make this dip.  If that's not reason enough to whip out your blender, look at the name of it: roasted tomato almond dip.  So you get the sweet flavor of roasted tomatoes (but don't worry, you use a can of fire-roasted to speed things up!) with a hint of nuttiness (not to mention protein).  This dip is delicious.

Now, it says to serve it with grilled bread, and I recommend that.  I was lazy the day I made it, and I just grabbed stale crackers from the cabinet to eat with it.  Even with stale crackers, the dip was amazing; I can only imagine how good a toasty piece of good bread would be.

I'll confess that my family was a bit unconventional when it came to suppertime; we liked the dip so much that we actually made pasta and ate it as a sauce!  That's how good it is.  When's the last time you made a dip that was so delicious, you wanted to eat on top of spaghetti?

Recipe:

roasted tomato almond dip
from A Couple Cooks

Ingredients:
3/4 cup roasted almonds
1 15-ounce can fire-roasted tomatoes
1 clove garlic
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 cup olive oil

Instructions:

1) In the bowl of a food processor, combine all the ingredients except the oil.  Process until the nuts are finely ground.

2) Scrape down the bowl.  Then, with the food processor running, add the olive oil in a steady stream until a paste forms.

3) Serve with crackers or grilled bread.

Spanakopita, or Spinach and Feta Phyllo Triangles

Along with the baba ganoush, I was in charge with making the spinach pies for Anne's niece's bridal shower, as I mentioned yesterday.  The baba ganoush was quick and simple.  These spinach pies were not!  Ha.  But they were worth it, and really they weren't that bad; I'm sure that tripling any recipe would take a long time.

I worked on these babies for two days; I made five or six trays' worth (well over 100 little triangles).  The good news is that they can be refrigerated if you want to put them together ahead of time before baking (they can also be frozen; I have two trays of frozen ones in the freezer right now!) so they are very doable for a party (or a shower).  And they are really delicious.  Anne said her party devoured two trays of them quickly, and when I baked a tray here for us, they were scarfed down in seconds.

Now, they are definitely not an everyday kind of thing to make and eat: first because of the sheer amount of time it takes to make the filling, prepare the phyllo dough, and fold the triangles, and second, because of the butter.  There is a lot of butter in these little pies; they must be special occasion only food!  Basically you take one thin sheet of phyllo dough and brush it with melted butter.  Add another sheet of dough, and add more butter.  Repeat one more time; then use a pizza cutter to divide it into thin rectangles, add the filling, and fold them up into triangles - then brush with more butter!  It's no wonder they are so delicious.

Butter time!

As for the filling, it's made with spinach and feta, obviously, but also parsley, scallions and dill, which really makes the flavors pop.  The dough is delicate ate flaky, and the filling is cheesy and herby and spinachy... they're just really good, and make it very hard to eat just one.

I worked on these for so much time that I think I could fold them into triangles in my sleep.  Since you may not have this knowledge yet, I recommend going to the blog I got the recipe from and checking out the step-by-step directions.  Once you figure it out, they go quickly!

Recipe:

spanakopita, or spinach and feta phyllo triangles
from Sprinkles of Parsley 

Ingredients:
1 package phyllo pastry
1/3 cup olive oil
1 bunch scallions, chopped
2 10-ounce packages frozen spinach, thawed
1 bunch parsley
1 bunch dill
1/2 pound crumbled feta cheese
3 eggs, lightly beaten
1 pound butter

Instructions:

1) Chop scallions (keep these separate from the herbs), parsley and dill.  Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat and saute scallions until soft.  Add spinach and saute until wilted, stirring constantly.  Strain the liquid from the spinach mixture into a small bowl.

2) Transfer spinach liquid to a small saucepan and heat over high heat until it reaches a boil.  Boil until the liquid is reduced to 2 tablespoons.  Transfer spinach mixture to a bowl and add and add the 2 tablespoons of spinach liquid, parsley, dill, and feta cheese.  Mix until combined.  Beat eggs in separate bowl, and add to mixture; stir until combined.

3) To prepare phyllo dough, carefully roll it out on a clean surface.  Place the sheet of plastic the dough came wrapped in over the entire surface and cover with a damp towel.  Always make sure to keep the towel over the plastic to avoid letting the dough dry out - but don't let the towel touch the dough or it will make it soggy.

4) Take one sheet of phyllo and lay it out on a clean surface (I used my pastry mat).  Brush the entire sheet of phyllo with melted butter.  Then lay a second sheet of phyllo over the first and brush with more butter.  Then cut your phyllo into 4 long strips; it is easiest to cut it in half and then cut each half again.

5) Spoon one teaspoon of filling onto the edge of each rectangle.  Lift your bottom right corner over the filling and evenly fold along the left side to create a clean edge.  Press down gently so the top is flat.  Then flip up, then to the right, to the left, up again, and continue the steps until you reach the edge of the phyllo.  Try to keep the edges always lined up to create a clean triangle.  When you reach the end, tuck any remaining dough under and placed on a grease cookie sheet.  Brush triangles with melted butter on both sides and bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes or until golden brown.

The lovely bride eating a spanakopita :)

Baba Ganoush

A couple weeks ago, our dear friend Anne was throwing a small wedding shower for her niece, who also happened to be my best friend in elementary school.  She was having a Middle Eastern theme (think Red Tent) and I was helping her out with good Middle Eastern snack ideas.  Our plan originally was to head to Worcester to buy what she needed, but she had a crazy schedule that weekend, so I came up with an equally crazy idea: what if I just made what she wanted to serve?  She already had other people bringing things like hummus and desserts, and all she needed was baba ganoush and spanakopita.  So I took on the catering job happily!

The baba ganoush was the first item I tackled.  It was actually quite easy.  For those of you not marrying a Middle Eastern man, baba ganoush is a pureed eggplant dip.  It is kind of similar to hummus, with cumin, lemon, tahini and (roasted) garlic, but it uses eggplant instead of chickpeas.  If you like eggplant, you'd love baba ganoush.  And if you don't love eggplant (who are you!?), at least you'll enjoy saying baba ganoush because it might be the most fun food name on earth.  Go ahead, you know you want to say it aloud right now.  Baba ganoush.

Anyway this dip was (luckily) easy, and it was simple to whip up 4 batches of it for the shower (with a little left home for us!)  Most recipes call for the eggplants to be charred on an open flame.  No open flames here (and I hope to never have a gas stove either, while we're on the subject), so I just roasted my eggplants as this recipe suggests.  Once they are roasted and peeled (which was a messy job but rather enjoyable), the insides are pureed (not too much though; rustic and chunky is good!) with the other flavorings.  It is supposed to be chilled, but I kind of fell in love with it being a tiny bit warm.  It is served with vegetables and/or pita bread.  And it is bound to be a hit.

Note the eggplant skin massacre in the background! :)

Recipe:

baba ganoush
from Daring Gourmet

Ingredients:
1 large eggplant
3 garlic cloves, peel on
2-3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, according to taste
1/4 cup tahini
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon salt plus more depending on size of eggplant
extra virgin olive oil for drizzling
chopped fresh cilantro for garnishing
pinch of paprika for garnishing


Instructions:

1) Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Poke the eggplants all over with the tines of a fork.  Place it on a baking sheet with the garlic and roast until tender, 40-45 minutes.  Remove the garlic after 30 minutes and remove the peel.  Remove the eggplants from the oven, let cool 10 minutes, and then remove the peel.

2) Place the eggplant, garlic and tahini in a food processor and process until fairly smooth but not completely pureed.  Scrape the mixture into a bowl and add the lemon juice, cumin and salt.  Stir thoroughly to combine.

3) With the back of a spoon, make a swirl in the top of the baba ganoush.  Drizzle olive oil in the swirl grooves, and sprinkle with paprika and fresh cilantro.

4) Serve immediately with toasted pita wedges, flatbread, or vegetables.

Soft Pretzel Bites

In another example of my BYOI rule while on vacation at the beach house, Pat requested soft pretzels. He tried one of the pretzels I had made the day I also made the pretzel dogs and had been craving more since then.  I will admit that I put off making them for him until his very last day at vacation.  Our week together was a nonstop heatwave; the thought of not only turning on the oven to 450 degrees but also having to boil the dough was just too much.  I literally thought there was a chance I'd overheat and die, because I think I came pretty close making dinner the other nights.  But finally I could put it off no longer, and I sucked it up and made Pat some soft pretzel bites.

I decided bites were a better idea than whole pretzels since we had such a crowd in the house and we'd get more for our buck.  I also decided to double the recipe.  This meant lots and lots of rolling, slicing, boiling and baking, but of course they were worth it.  I've never met a soft pretzel that I didn't like.  And 100% of them were gone within an hour or so, so I guess we can assume they were enjoyed by all!

The great part about this recipe is that Annie has listed three different ways to enjoy pretzel bites; you can make the regular ones like I did, or use the same dough to make a cinnamon-sugar variation or a garlic herb.  She also lists two different dipping sauces, chocolate and cheddar (respectively, obviously!).  I only made the regular ones; to be honest, I had planned on making the cinnamon-sugar ones with the second batch of dough, but when the first batch was eaten immediately after they came out of the oven, I figured I wouldn't even have time to mix up the cinnamon and sugar :)  Since I only did the regular version, I am only going to post those instructions here, but please feel free to visit Annie's Eats to get the (simple) ingredients to make either variation or sauce.

Recipe:

soft pretzel bites
from Annie's Eats
yield 12-16 servings

Ingredients:
basic pretzel dough:
1 1/2 cups warm water (110-115 degrees)
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast
22 ounces (about 4 1/2 cups) all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
vegetable oil, for greasing the bowl
to finish:
10 cups water
2/3 cup baking soda
1 egg yolk beaten with 1 tablespoon water
pretzel or kosher salt

Instructions:

1) Combine the water, sugar, salt and yeast in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment.  Mix on low speed to dissolve the yeast. Add in the flour and the melted butter and mix just until the dough comes together.  Switch to the dough hook and knead on medium speed until the dough is smooth and clears the side of the bowl, about 5 minutes.  Transfer the dough to a bowl lightly greased with vegetable oil, turning once to coat.  Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place, about 50-55 minutes or until doubled in bulk.

2) Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper and spray lightly with cooking spray.  Bring the water and the baking soda to a boil in a large saucepan or stockpot.  Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and gently deflate it.  Divide it up into approximately 6 equal portions.  Working with one piece at at time, roll the dough out into a long rope about 1 inch in diameter.  Use a pizza cutter to cut the row into small segments, no longer than 1 inch each.  Repeat with the remaining dough.

3) Place the pretzel bites into the boiling water in batches so that they aren't overcrowded.  Boil each batch for about 30 seconds, stirring once or twice to submerge all surfaces in the water.  Remove from the water with a slotted skimmer and spread out on the prepared baking sheets.  Once all the pretzels have been boiled, brush the tops with the egg wash and sprinkle lightly with salt.  Bake in the preheated oven until dark golden brown, about 9-11 minutes.  Transfer to a cooling rack for at least 5 minutes before serving.  Serve with mustard.