Dips & Spreads

In Which I Return to this Blog and also to Curried Squash Soup

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Image by SooYeongBeh from Pixabay; not my soup, but close!

Hello folks!

I find that I miss writing on this food blog, much as I love writing about choral music on my Behind the Music site. (Be sure to subscribe on the sidebar, and make plans to attend the concert that my choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is performing this coming weekend, October 15 & 16. If you do miss this one, our Christmas concert will be the next one. I will say that normally I’d be in the throes of planning the Friday-night post-conert reception this week, but we’re not having a reception for this concert. I have high hopes for Christmas, though) As the world is s-l-o-w-l-y opens up again I’m getting back into food events. There have been two recently that haven’t shown up on this blog; let me tell you about the one that took place just this past weekend, and I’ll save the other one for later.

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A Christmas Grab-Bag

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Hi folks! Today is Christmas Day. I started this post two days ago, but company and outings and cooking interrupted me. Probably no one is going to read this post until tomorrow, but if you do get to it today—Merry Christmas! You can think of this as a holiday grab-bag.

First, an idea articulated by my husband, one of those blindingly-obvious statements that never occurs to anyone:

One of the reasons why you had less trouble with your weight as a child then you do now as an adult is that children aren’t in control of what food is available. Adults are.

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Featherlight, Ethereal, Non-Library-Paste Hummus

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Drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with lemon pepper, smoked paprika, and cumin.

For years I’ve had a very basic hummus recipe–chickpeas from a can, lemon juice, tahini, garlic, olive oil and salt, all dumped into the food processor and whirled until pulverized. It was fine as an occasional lunch item, sometimes spread on a flour tortilla with some veggies and rolled up to make a wrap. I would also make it for occasions when I thought I absolutely had to serve some kind of appetizer, say if people were coming over to watch the Super Bowl. But it wasn’t something I ever got too excited about it. I liked it, but it wasn’t an obsession.

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Simplified Layered Pesto-and-Tomato Spread

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elegant lunch plateI originally made a version of this recipe from my beloved Beat This cookbook, and while I really liked it there were some issues. For one thing, dear Ann Hodgman, the author, has you make your own pesto and then drain it in a sieve to get as much of the oil out as you can–so you put the oil in, and then you take the oil out. You can certainly buy pre-made pesto, as I do, but be sure you buy it from Costco or some such. Regular grocery stores sell it, but it comes in small jars with big prices. She called for sun-dried tomatoes for the tomato layer, but she specified that they be dry-packed, not oil-packed, which are hard to find. The tomatoes were to be diced and scattered across the cream-cheese layer, which meant that you wouldn’t necessarily get any tomato in a small dab on a cracker. It never occurred to me that I could make it any differently, so I made it Ann’s way and people really liked it. Later on I ran into the version I’m posting here. and because the layers all have some cream cheese in them and are mixed in a food processor they’re pretty smooth. Then, I realized that the sun-dried tomatoes aren’t really necessary because they’re going to get pureed anyway; you can just use tomato paste. What you really want is the color and the taste.

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Debi’s Magic Green Sauce–The World’s Greatest Dip

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bowl of magic green sauce
image from https://pinchofyum.com/5-minute-magic-green-sauce

Debi’s Magic Green Sauce–The World’s Greatest Dip

If someone said to you that from now on you had just one choice for making a dip for a party, then you’d be obligated to choose this one. I have other really good dips on this website that your guests will like very much, but none that get swooned over quite as much as this one does. I get asked about it every time it shows up at a party or reception for which I’ve provided food. At a wedding reception I’d made a basinful of it, and at one point an aunt of the bride burst into the kitchen and said something like, “Who made that cilantro stuff?!” When I modestly cast down my eyes and said I had, she informed me that her husband was from Mexico and had loved it, saying it was very authentic. Which is pretty funny, as you’ll see below, since I got it from a Minnesota source.

I got the original recipe from a monster cooking blog called Pinch of Yum, where it was called “5-Minute Magic Green Sauce.” (Original in the sense of  where I originally got it; there are other versions of this online although not, that I can see, with this exact mix of ingredients. Some just add pistachios to regular guacamole.) It is totally great, but let me say that this isn’t really a 5-minute recipe, with all due respect where respect is due. I do save quite a bit of time when I make it nowadays, though, by following the helpful hint about cilantro stems that I list in the recipe. I used to spend I don’t know how much time stripping the leaves from the cilantro stems. However, no matter how much time it takes, it is well worth making. When I made this the first time for a reception, people scarfed this down like you wouldn’t believe, and then stood around the bowl forlornly scraping out the last molecules with pita chips. I should have made at least a double recipe that time, and indeed I usually do so now. The recipe is really a combination of a type of pesto (the herb/oil/nut component) and guacamole (the avocado/jalapeno/lime component). Lindsay Ostrom, the original recipe’s author, says it can be used as a dip, spread or salad dressing depending on how thin you make it. It could work on a very sturdy salad with lots of crunchy ingredients and would be good on any kind of meat or fish as a sauce (my son tasted it and said, “This would be really good with beef”), with any raw vegetable as a dip, or with some type of neutral-flavored chip or cracker. In my version below I took out the water (which you could add back in if you want a dressing) and upped the avocado and the jalapeno.

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Two Savory Cheesecakes

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a blue cheese and a savory herb cheesecakeYou know what they say:  The reward for working hard is to be asked to do more work.  In this case, though, the work was a pleasure and being asked to do it was a great compliment.  A couple from the Chorale, Barb and John Wollan, asked me if I would be willing to do the reception for the small (ha!) recital that they were planning to give.  They’d pay me.  Oh no, I said.  Being paid makes things very complicated.  I’m happy to do it.  So above you can see the results.  I had been assured that the number attending would be 100 at the very most.  Well, there were at least 150, so I’m afraid that I spent much of the performance worrying that there wouldn’t be enough food.  It ended up fine, though.  We even ended up with a whole gallon of leftover cider.

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