Our family loves to spend a Sunday watching the Bears. The schedule this year has not coordinated with our family schedule. Lacrosse took most of our Sundays, and the Monday and Thursday night games are too late for school nights. Last weekend my husband was lucky enough to get to see the game, his two favorite teams, the Bears and Lions. This weekend is our first chance to watch and enjoy the Bears as a family. What goes better with football than, football food!
We always struggle to come up with new appetizer ideas. Always! Yet, most of the recent recipes I have posted are appetizers. Go figure. I decided to go old school and flip through my book or recipe cards for some ideas, and ran across a recipe for artichoke dip that caught my eye (and I had everything on hand)…
My friend Jill gave me this recipe. Jill and I worked together in NYC. Our office was on Park Ave in midtown, it was very shee-shee. It was the hey-day, breakfast was served every Monday morning, the kitchen was stocked with drinks and snacks, a show-shine came in once a week and shined the executive’s shoes at their desk, a masseuse came in once a week and setup shop in the conference room. An expensed lunch at a place like Le Cirque was standard practice. Good times! Of course, being the IT people in the office, we shared a counter for our desks in an inside space that was essentially the copy/server room.
The office occupied the entire floor of the building. The executives sat around the perimeter in the windowed offices. The admins around the inner perimeter outside the offices. Everyone in the office was so nice, especially considering I was an outsider and essentially squatting in their office while continuing to work for the folks back in Chicago. It was a very fortunate situation for me. Over time I came to realize the inner perimeters of admins had segregated each other around geographic origin. All the native Mid-westerners sat down one two walls, and the East Coasters down the other walls. The separation had happened naturally overtime, the two groups seemed to mix like oil and water. It was such an odd phenomenon to me.
That was over 15 years-ago. Jill and I are have both since moved back to the Midwest. We don’t get a chance to see each other often, but we keep in close touch. No one is better a host then she, no detail is ever overlooked. Her cooking is pretty fabulous too. She is always the first person I run to when I am in search of a recipe, or to get help with a party or dinner gathering, among other things. She gave me this recipe probably 13 years-ago after she came to stay with us in Chicago. What I really love about this recipe, is the flavor of the artichoke is not drowned in cream cheese or other overwhelming ingredients. While it is hearty, it is not too heavy.
- 1 T. butter
- 1/4 cup onion, chopped fine
- 1 clove garlic, chopped fine
- 1 small package frozen spinach
- 1 can artichoke hearts, chopped
- 1 cup Parmesan cheese, grated
- 1/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
- dash of hot sauce
- 1 teaspoon lemon juice
- 1/4 teaspoon curry powder
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise
- 1/2 cup sour cream
- 1 small can chopped green chiles
- 1/2 cup mozzarella, grated
- Heat butter in a skillet. Saute onion about 5 minutes. Add in garlic and cook 1 more minute. Let cool.
- Defrost spinach in strainer. Press water out.
- In a large bowl mix all(except mozzarella) ingredients.
- Transfer mix into greased casserole, top with mozzarella.
- Back at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes.
- Serve with pita chips or thick tortilla chips and vegetables.
I changed the original recipe a little bit. I cut back on the mayo and added some sour cream. I like this new Greek yogurt and sour cream mixture from Breakstone’s. It is essentially light sour cream cut with plain Greek yogurt.
The chiles provide a good zip, but not too much heat. The curry adds great flavor, but no one would guess it was an ingredient. The lemon juice adds some brightness. While leftovers are rare, they make great pita nachos (pitas, topped with dip, mozzarella, back and then top with chopped tomatoes and green onion) or as a pizza topping.
This was a victory in the kitchen, I am 2-2 this weekend. Can’t win ‘em all! We got plenty of Bears time today, especially thankfully we escaped the worst of the storms. The pictures look devastating, heartbroken for those impacted.
I couldn’t believe the devastation down south – we were lucky too – windy/stormy, but no downed trees or loss of power.
I worked in a boutique law firm on Michigan Avenue for 15 months – and what you described was exactly how this place was – they even had tailors come to the attorneys offices to measure for shirts and suits!
While I don’t like artichokes on their own, I love them in dips like yours – yum! Happy Back To The Grind Monday! 🙁
Looks delicious!
That looks great Jacky! I only got to watch half the game – but glad they won after all that crazy weather!
That storm was really something, I am glad he wasn’t at that game. Don’t forget all of the shee shee parties and the fact that we could order just about anything for lunch and have it delivered, or how about the car service to drive us home if we had to make a change on the weekend or at night. Also, when I started, they were just introducing that thing called the world wide web and external email. That was a long time ago. Long lunches were always fun too. So sad, those were the days. At least we get to say things to the kids like, well when I was younger. . .
I am going to try to make that with greek yogurt, num. I think you are my go to for recipes as well. I have already made the pumpkin cheddar dip twice and it will get made again on Thanksgiving!
Oh, how I loved the town car service! Much nicer ride from CT to Hoboken. Man, the WWW and email, that was livin’!
looks like terry’s handwriting (?) Yummmm, love the artichike dip. Erica requests it often upon returning home.
Taking others advice that this was a big cake, I made the mix into cupcakes. This way I made 24 cupcakes which I will freeze and add to the kids lunchbox. Using all organic ingredients I swapped the caster sugar for raw sugar, changed the sour cream to soy yoghurt and added some orange juice and rind and some cardamom. They have turned out moist, light and fluffy, this is a great recipe. They are even perfect on their own without the icing so no sticky fingers at school or messy lunchboxes.
I made a giant pot of beef chili that I found from an old (like, 20 years!) Gourmet magazine, which, like almost all Gourmet recipes I run across, makes me sniffle and miss the magazine (in its original incarnation, that is, I haven’t made sense of this app thing yet) even more. Here, they gathered all of the things you’d normally dollop on top of a bowl of chili — cheddar, sour cream and pickled jalapeños — and formed them into a biscuit, which they use to serve the chili shortcake-style. I bet you didn’t know chili could be so cute! I just want to stand up and applaud their creativity but instead I’m very sad, because I’ve been bereft of fresh batches of it for nearly a year. I did not cry into this chili, however, because it was awesome, so awesome that the member of our family who a) does not know how to use a spoon, b) wants to eat what you’re eating but c) refuses to be fed from a spoon actually honored us with the privilege of letting us feed him. And tucked away a frightening amount of chili. The chili is that tremendous.