Give thanks for the unlikeliest of seven-layer dips.

Seven layers of Thanksgiving classics, served on toast points. © Ryan Schierling

It's the last day of November and your Thanksgiving leftovers, if there are any left over, are languishing. 

Every turkey-day legacy recipe has already been searched for and modified. There's nothing new or interesting under the waning Fall sun, and you're about to dig the remains out of the fridge and drop them into a pet dish. It's the feast he/she/it has been waiting for all along – so many hours of preparation and work, the vestiges dumped into your dog's bowl on the floor and devoured in large, breathless, indiscriminate gulps in a matter of seconds. 

Though sometimes disturbed, I am not weak and/or unimaginative in the kitchen (see this, this or this.) Chez nous, these pets, our cats, are absolutely not getting my leftovers, my legacy. Cranberries and dressing probably aren't even good for them.

If you're lucky, you should have at least a wee bit of six of these seven layers already. There is dressing, mashed potatoes, turkey gravy, sweet potatoes in some form or fashion (this year we had sweet potato gratin in poblano cream), green bean casserole and cranberry sauce. The odd man out is turkey liver pate, which both utilizes some of the giblets and provides the backbone for this spread. 

Hot meat dip.

Hot meat dip - queso with smoked beef brisket. © Ryan Schierling

You've all certainly heard of the Great Velveeta Shortage of 2014 by now. "Increased seasonal demand" and a shifting of production lines from one plant to another led to a shortage of the famous pasteurized prepared cheese product, especially the more moderately-sized eight- and sixteen-ounce loaves. Moderately-sized... how cute. Your Super Bowl party is screwed. 

Thankfully, here in Texas, every grocer worth their inflated sodium content has a year-round endcap with nothing but #10 cans of Ro*Tel and five-pound chubs of Velveeta. No man, woman or child will ever go without queso here because, in The Great Republic of Texas, queso is a birthright. 

Back in the Ghetto Melrose days of Seattle, hot meat dip mysteriously became a party staple. I'm not sure how it all started, but browned ground beef, Velveeta, a tin of tomatoes with green chiles and a secret mix of spices would bubble away in an ancient, volcanic crock pot next to a gigantic bowl of tortilla chips. It was easy, and it was always a hit. 

Don't call it a comeback / I've been here for years.

Homemade Mississippi Comeback Sauce. © Ryan Schierling

Twenty years ago, in Fort Collins, Colorado, I was a store manager working for the clown. Say what you will about McDonald's Corporation, they were my first job and an invaluable life lesson in the business end of food. When it was time to move on, I took the good, left the bad and haven't really looked back since.

Until a few weeks ago, that is, when I developed a single-minded focus on Mississippi's mother of all condiments, Comeback Sauce. I've taken a shine to some specific regional Southern specialties, especially ones that aren't often found outside their culinary stomping grounds.

Comeback Sauce (née Kumback Sauce, Cumback Sauce) is a Jackson, Mississippi (that's MS, Jackson if you're nasty) original from the 1930s, widely credited to Greek immigrant Alex Dennery at his restaurant The Rotisserie. Used as a "house dressing," comeback seems to be closely related to 1000 Island, Russian, Catalina and French dressings in spirit. A British Marie Rose? Parallel invention, perhaps.

The only differences in these very similar sauces are in the… subtleties. A bit of grated horseradish there, some minced onion here, tomato paste instead of chili sauce, yogurt instead of mayonnaise, a touch of white vinegar or pickle juice; like every sauce or dressing the whims of the cook and the plenty of the pantry come into play.

But I digress. For me, this really all goes back 20 years to french fry sauce. McDonald's french fry sauce.

Double dipping.

Feta and spinach dip... it's what Wheat Thins® crave. © Ryan Schierling

A great many of you hold a special place in your heart (and stomach) for our three-ingredient, 24-hour caramelized onion dip. It was the second-most popular Foie Gras Hot Dog read of 2011 and "Chips, dips and dorks" is still one of my favorite posts ever (though I have formally apologized to Starkey for calling his eating pony-sized horseshoes at D'Arcy's Pint half-assed).

It was exactly this time last year we unleashed that dip, just in time for the big football match. Event? Football game? Game. (Hockey fan, forgive me.)

There aren't too many other dip recipes in circulation in our household. Of course, we do make queso, because if you live in Texas and don't make queso, you run the risk of being branded a communist and the state will come and take your babies away. But that's a recipe for another day, and this is one of our new faves.

Frustrated with countless bad versions of spinach-artichoke hot-mess, I started at zero and made things up as I went along. Now, there is no cream cheese, no artichokes, no gooey, bubbling lava that congeals into a lumpy, grey cheese brick after 10 minutes out of the oven. This is a simple, delicious and easy-to-make recipe with – like our onion dip – only three ingredients. Unlike our onion dip, it only takes about 15 minutes. And, you know what? It's pretty, too.


Feta and spinach dip

1 10 ounce package frozen chopped spinach, cooked, with all liquid squeezed out
16 ounces sour cream
12 ounces of the best fresh feta cheese in brine you can find – this will not work with that dry, pre-crumbled crap you buy in plastic tubs at the grocer (we use Bulgarian sheep feta from Phoenecia here in Austin)
1 tablespoon crushed red pepper flakes

In a small covered saucepan over medium-low heat, cook the frozen spinach in a bit of water until done. Drain the spinach in a colander and squeeze out all remaining liquid. Put the spinach into a food processor, add the sour cream and crumble in the feta cheese. Add a tablespoon of crushed red pepper flakes and whiz until well mixed. Serve with a sprinkle of crushed red pepper flakes on top and a side of Wheat Thins. (I chose Wheat Thins® because the slight sweetness of the cracker works ridiculously well with the rich, tangy and salty flavors of the dip. If you want veg, carrot sticks work really well.)

Oh, and Superbowl something, something. Superbowl. Whatever. 

Bleu for you.

Blue cheese dressing. Iceberg and bacon optional. © Ryan Schierling

Ah, the classic iceberg lettuce wedge with blue cheese...

Cool. Crisp. Refreshing. A pungent cheese that speaks straight to the heart of a "stinky cheese" lover like me.

It's no secret I'm a huge fan of what Ryan calls "challenging cheeses." I'm pretty sure I come by it naturally, though. Big "shout out" to Mom and Dad, here, because unlike most American kids of my generation who were brought up eating Ranch dressing on every-freaking-thing, I grew up eating a lot of blue cheese. By this I mean it was the salad dressing of choice in our family. At restaurants it was always "four salads with blue cheese, please."

That simplicity quite possibly made up for some of our more ambitious meat-substitution requests when dining out. At home it was always either blue cheese or Roquefort, a blue cheese of a slightly different color, you know... for variety. About the only way I remember eating Ranch was as an occasional dip for raw vegetables. Even then I didn't get the appeal, and Thousand Island just seemed like a visit to the dark side.

Looking back, it's actually a little surprising that we never made blue cheese dressing from scratch when I was growing up. Granted, we were pretty picky about the brands we chose (the best supermarket varieties are in jars in the produce section) and there are plenty of bad blue cheese dressings out there. So, I very much appreciate the serendipity of having this wonderful recipe grace my repertoire via Steven, my fabulous father-in-law-in-a-former-life. I asked him, recently, how he had come upon it and this is the story he related.

Cousin Larry's smoked salmon dip.

Smoked salmon dip w/ homemade crackers. © Ryan Schierling

Julie and I have different stories for how we obtained this recipe. She swears we reverse-engineered it straight from the Larry's Market ingredient list on the side of the plastic to-go container. I swear we begged for it from the fishmonger at Larry's Market in Seattle before the chain was bought out under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, afraid that our favorite in-house-made smoked salmon dip would never be seen on their refrigerated shelves again.

It's been years and years that we've been making this dip, and the scrawled notes on a loose piece of 8 1/2" by 11" paper tucked into our overstuffed recipe binder hold no further clues to its origins, so I'm going to side with my (perhaps misplaced) nostalgia and simply attribute it to cousin Larry from Seattle.

Get yourself a nice piece of fresh Alaskan salmon. Our local grocer was laying out sides of never-frozen Alaskan coho (silver) salmon, and that was all it took for me to get on the phone and tell J to start making crackers. Find yourself some chunks/chips of apple wood.

Remove pin-bones with a pair of tweezers and brine that fish in a 50/50 mixture of kosher salt and brown sugar dissolved in a couple gallons of water, for about eight hours. Rinse, pat dry, and let sit out at room temperature for 3-4 hours, periodically making sure your cats have not expressed an interest in the fish. This drying time ensures a nice tacky pellicle will have formed, allowing the wood smoke to really adhere to the salmon and keep moisture in while the fish is kippering on the grill or smoker.

Soak a few good handfuls of apple wood in water for half an hour. Set aside a few good handfuls of dry apple wood. If using a kettle grill, set up the coals for indirect grilling – coals on one side, and a disposable aluminum pan filled with a few inches of water on the other. Ideally, your grill or smoker will be between 150- and 190-degrees. If it's hotter, that's fine, but this isn't a race... you're just going to have to keep a closer eye on the internal temperature of your fish.

Place the wet and dry apple wood on your coals. Here comes the smoke. When using a kettle grill, I open the bottom vent and close the top. When using an offset barrel smoker, I close the top vent and adjust the firebox vent according to my smoker temperature. Kipper the salmon, thick part of the filet toward the firebox, until it reaches an internal temperature of 130-degrees in the thickest part of the filet. Remove and let cool.

I gotta go water the wood. © Ryan Schierling

Or, save yourself 12 hours, spend four times as much and get a 4 oz. piece of pre-packaged, already-smoked salmon. It's up to you, and this isn't a recipe for smoked salmon... really, it's a recipe for smoked salmon dip. So, uhm, here it is... straight from the archives.


Salmon Dip (like Larry's Market)

8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/4 cup real mayonnaise 
1/2 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
4 oz. hot-smoked (kippered) salmon
4 tablespoons green onion, finely chopped

Mix first three ingredients together in stand mixer, with whisk attachment, until light and fluffy. Crumble in the smoked salmon (check well for bones) and add green onions. Mix until evenly incorporated. If desired, add additional Tabasco at this point, to taste (we use closer to 1 teaspoon). Serve with your cracker of choice. 

Chips, dips and dorks.

Caramelized onion dip, aka "crack dip." © Ryan Schierling

Onion dip.

This is not a subject lightly traversed in this household.

Your mother might tell you to get a dry packet of Knorr's or Lipton Onion Soup Mix and stir it up with some sour cream and mayonnaise, and I would promptly tell your mother to get bent.

That's not onion dip. Nor are the tubs of "Onion Dip" or "French Onion Dip" or "Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil Whipped With Dehydrated Onion Pieces" next to the sour cream and margarine products at your local grocer. They are simulacrum. Amalgamations. Abominations. (And I hold deep-seated reservations.)

This onion dip is three ingredients.

It sounds easy. Too easy. But it's not. It takes 24 hours to make, and do not take those 24 hours lightly.