The Dip

When Jessie Moniz Hardy from The Royal Gazette emails you to set up an interview about your blog you’re thrilled and respond with a resounding “yes.” You click the enter button and then reality hits you. She’s coming to your house. She wants to take pictures.

You quickly begin a diet with the goal of losing twenty pounds in two days, but you eventually decide on a more realistic goal of ten. You throw some vegetables in a blender and hope for the best.

You tell your husband that he needs to take the next two days off to repaint the house. When your pleas fall on deaf ears, you come to a mutual agreement that the least he can do is wash the dog.

In the meantime, you take a toothbrush to your kitchen floor.  You scour the sinks and wash the windows. You try to jam your half-dead Christmas tree up the chimney (you fail.)

The night before the  interview, you’ve gained two pounds and your knuckles are bare. The only saving grace is that you’ve managed to get an appointment with Ellen at Salon Twenty-seven, so your hair looks great.

But then it hits you. It’s not a home improvement blog or a beauty blog, it’s a food blog!

You breath a sign of relief and you finally begin to cook. You’re suspicious that  Jessie’s Portuguese ancestry has her sniffing out your Chourico & Chicken sliders, so you whip that up for her to try. But you’ve written about that already and you want to impress your guests with something new. Something universally adored.

And then you remember THE DIP.

The dip speaks for itself. It’s The Dip. People think it’s just a Dip, but once they try it they realise it’s The Dip…and there’s a difference. When you make The Dip, that’s all you need to make.

Your guests tell you how brilliant you are, and how it’s the best thing they’ve ever eaten. When you’re busy in the kitchen replenishing the tortilla chips, people try to hide it in their purses. They don’t care about the mess. They only care about The Dip and how much of it they can jam into their mouths.

Its appeal is universal, from kids to adults to the elderly. It’s the only recipe you need, just make sure people check their bags at the door

 

THE RECIPE

1 softened 8 oz package of cream cheese (nuke it for 15 seconds or so)

1 cup of sour cream

1 package of taco seasoning mix

A few shakes of cayenne paper (remember spice is good. Leave it out if you’re a wimp)

Mix these things together (with a beater to get out any lumps) and spread over a round serving platter (round is good because this ends up looking something like a pizza which people think is cool. If you had a cat-shaped platter, I suppose people would think it was a cat, although I’m not sure why you’d want to eat a cat. The choice is yours.)

Sprinkle the following items on top

• finely chopped red and green pepper (hand chop these or they get mushy and gross. If you find that task tedious, get your husband to do it)
• finely chopped and seeded tomatoes
• finely chopped coriander (the most important ingredient, in my humble opinion. Leave it out if you don’t like it, but people may not like you….)
• finely shredded cheese (I like the packaged kind that’s a mix of white and orange because that’s really pretty.)

Serve with Tortilla chips or some sort of vegetable if you have guests who are health freaks.