Of course, as you may have come to expect, I have to add my own touch to the excellent recipe on the box.
A suggested variation on the recipe is to add sliced water chestnuts. We had a can of whole water chestnuts but no sliced. No worries, mate. I have sharp knives and I know how to use them.
After mixing in the suggested amounts of sour cream, mayonnaise, soup mix, and shrimp (that's my variation tonight, tastes great!), I realized that I'd need a bigger bowl before adding in the newly sliced water chestnuts and the last ingredient, frozen spinach.
Since I needed to thaw the spinach in a seperate bowl and press out as much moisture as I could, I just used that bowl to finish the mixing.
Next, I wanted to make this a little more special than just plopping it into a bowl and diving in with potatoe chips. The grocery store today had some great olive oil and rosemary artisan bread. Kind of surprised me because we're not in a neighborhood that appreciates things like that.
To get that ready I cut the top off and dug out some of the bread inside to make a nice little bowl. Because I knew we'd be eating the bowl I also sliced the sides a bit to make it easier to tear the pieces out.
I'm pretty short on fancy serving plates (donations accepted) so a round cake pan had to stand in for that duty.
It must have been pretty good, we laid waste to that field.
I'm wondering how this would be with some fresh roasted garlic added to the mix, and maybe some finely chopped cilantro to give it a little bit of a kick... I'll bet a fire roasted jalapeno would be good... and a fire roasted red bell pepper would really add a nice splash of color. Lots of variations to keep in mind for next time.
One suggestion... a really big suggestion: when you buy frozen spinach for anything you want to eat, buy the good stuff. Frozen spinach is cheap, spend the extra dollar and get a well known brand. The store I bought the frozen spinach for this dip at only had one brand, the cheap crap. The spinach was stringy and I found a couple of crunchy bits in it. I don't want to think about what could be crunchy in spinach so I didn't examine those closely.
Save yourself some grief, buy the good spinach.
Enjoy!
2 comments:
I enjoyed finishing the last of this. I think maybe we could use the ceramic pie dish Bonnie gave us to serve the bread in. I'm not sure if it's big enough. Also, at the Morro Bay Harbor Festival they serve clam chowder in individual size bread bowls, so maybe I could make something like that to put the dip in. Then each person would have their own bowl.
You could try putting an Anaheim chili from the garden in some. This will be even better in the winter months with some warm soup.
I hope you do a blog on your chicken soup next time you make it.
All good ideas, thanks.
I was thinking of playing with tamales next, Jon's Market has pork shoulder on sale for $.99 lb.
However, Food 4 Less has whole chickens on sale for $.67 lb.
Those are both good prices and well in keeping with my practice of getting meat on sale. Which would you prefer?
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