Thinking Outside the Back of the Box: Hot Pimiento Cheese Bacon Dip
Back of the box recipes are a national treasure – really. I know I’ve poked fun at cream-of-something soups before, but when it comes to convenience cooking, it doesn’t get much easier than reading a recipe off the back of a package. It serves as inspiration, menu planning, and even a shopping list right there in the store. (Pretty hi-falutin’ talk for someone who believes that pre-shredded cheese is for Hufflepuffs.)
Recommended reading: “The Man Who Ate Everything” by Jeffrey Steingarten, which includes a fantastic essay on back of the box cooking.
And there’s always a time and place, and recently that time and place was in my office break room, where a coworker brought in a hot bacon dip that made me very happy. It also made me beg for the recipe, which I immediately started trying to fancy up, first by adding pimientos.
Pimiento cheese has been all over the news lately, (the kind of news I read anyway) as an intrepid blogger traced the origins and discovered that a) It is NOT a Southern dish (no!) b) it was originally made with cream cheese (NO!), and c) it was from New York (bitch, please!) It’s a great piece and I recommend reading it over at Serious Eats, but I’m not getting into it – they already did it better. As far as I’m concerned, pimiento cheese a) is Southern comfort food b) should always be made according to my own personal recipe, and c) not New York. Just no. I can’t even. But how about we ignore this travesty for a while and invent Hot Pimiento Cheese Bacon Dip, a gourmet treat? (Note: I don’t think this legally counts as “gourmet”.)
So here we have:
8 oz. Cream Cheese
8 oz. Cheddar Cheese
½ Cup Mayo
Bacon!
A few points – the bacon is real, good stuff from the butcher. Bacon has gotten absurdly expensive recently, but the local shop had it for $3.99/lb., which is cheaper than the paper-thin fatty stuff at Kroger. I’m also switching the Swiss to Cheddar, since it just goes so well with bacon. I would eat a flip-flop from the end-of-summer clearance rack at Old Navy if you covered it with cheddar cheese and bacon.
Grate the cheese however you like. Let the cream cheese soften. Chop the bacon and fry it up in a pan. Doesn’t this picture make you happy?
Strain one small jar of diced pimientos and rinse them. I don’t like the brine-y taste of un-rinsed pimientos.
Then add ½ teaspoon each of salt, black pepper, and cayenne to give it a little kick.
For a finishing and decorative touch, chop a couple scallions very thinly on the bias to add some green. Maybe this even makes it healthy. (Probably not.)
Add the pimientos, bacon, and scallions and mix everything up very well. (Here’s a tip – I buy food-grade rubber gloves for mixing everything from chicken salad to meatball mix. Spoons are great – I’m not knocking spoons. Heaven forbid I knock spoons. But when you’re dealing with the kind of volume I generally cook in, sometimes your hands just get the job done quicker.)
Scoop into a shallow baking dish, ramekins, or the like.
Crush four or five Ritz crackers in a plastic baggie and sprinkle over the top. Bake at 350 for twenty to thirty minutes. Serve with more Ritz and kiss your diet goodbye.
I’m sorry I forgot to take an “after” picture – due to my overwhelming popularity I had two parties to attend last night, and by the time we started dipping, I was distracted by family members, cute babies, and beers. The top will be lightly golden and the cheese will be bubbling merrily around the edges. And the feedback was generally pretty damn good, one lovely friend even going so far to say this recipe should be in Southern Living (!).
Kitchen experiments don’t always work out – they mostly don’t actually. (Recall the misery of my failed goat cheese.) But this one definitely goes in the Win column, and I add a new weapon to my arsenal of cheesy goodness. This one is a keeper – people will ask for the recipe. They will ask you to bring this to parties. You might even get invited to more parties as a result, improving your over-all confidence and self esteem.
(Party #1 and the cute baby were courtesy of Lauren McDuffie at http://harvestandhoney.com/ where you should go if you like better photography, more interesting recipes, and just better blogging in general. Go right now! No, actually finish reading MY blog first, then head over there.) (Hi Lauren!)
In the spirit of Back of the Box cooking, I include a list of ingredients/shopping list, which I am usually far too lazy to bother with:
1 8 oz. bar of cream cheese
1 8 oz. bar of cheddar cheese
Mayonnaise (you should already have this in your fridge)
Bacon! (Here I used five medium-thick slices)
1 4 oz. jar of diced pimientos
Scallions (I actually have some growing out back, but heck – they’re like $.69 a bunch)
Salt
Pepper
Cayenne
Another note: A quick spin on Pinterest shows a bunch of similar recipes. Like, really a lot. I thought I was being truly original, but apparently I was not. Fortunately I can’t find one that’s exactly the same, so I’ll still take this as a win.
One last thought – in a pretty ramekin with cooking instructions and a cute spreader, this would make a great hostess gift. Just a thought.
illdothedisheslater 