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. 

Following the fete.

(Bottles L-R) Limoncello, plum bourbon, Rainier cherry bump. © Ryan Schierling

We kind of skipped the ever-inundating pre-Thanksgiving food-blog blast this year, instead opting to toast to some post-feast palliatives. You already know what to do with your turkey, you know how to make the classic sides and the not-so-classic sides, you know how to crank out handcrafted heirloom sweet potato ice cream with back-woods small-batch maple syrup and homemade marshmallows, obviously.

Obviously. 

Get started on a few of these tipples now and you'll have plenty of practice time before next season's holiday haze begins. 

There are menu pages of before-dinner drinks available. Some people just call those drinks. The French have a couple of words that have become synonymous with the intake of specific alcoholic beverages before and after dinner – apéritif and digestif – which basically mean "to open" and "a digestive." In America, we call apéritifs "happy hour," and that's unfortunate, because it literally translates to "half-price well drinks and non-import draft beers, cheapskate."

Apertifs are usually herbal recipes meant to stimulate the appetite. I don't typically need a reason to be hungry, so here at home we occasionally like to sip on the after-dinner beverage – the digestif. 

New Orleans, new again.

I-10 East, 90+ mph, just out of Houston. Swing-lens panoramic film camera. The flask is in my argyle sock, sucker. (Click for larger.) © Ryan Schierling

I was a teenager the last time I was in New Orleans, insisting on eating nothing but giant bowls of seafood gumbo as our family vacation took us through Louisiana and across the south. I didn't understand the nuances of Creole or Cajun cuisine, or the origins of the dish, and I didn't care. All I wanted was a spicy bowl of something new and exotic – kissed with Louisiana hot sauce – that I couldn't get back home in Kansas. I affectionately remember Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo, the Maison Dupuy's talking bird in the hotel lobby, and window shopping for a Nikon F3HP camera that I couldn't afford on Canal Street. 

Somehow, It's been 25 years since I set foot in the Crescent City. Julie's never been. 

Now that we're living in Austin, it's an eight-hour drive to New Orleans. There are no longer any excuses. Mardi Gras seems a touch over-indulgent for a proper reintroduction, so I make a few impulsive calls and December 30th we point the car east for a celebration of New Year's Eve.

The things we do not talk about.

Low-rent neighborhood on The Island of Dr. Moreau, with buttermilk dressing. © Ryan Schierling

Jalapeño poppers are pretty pedestrian fare nowadays.

Restaurants push pre-fab Sysco peppers and the grocery store sells sad, tiny, tamed versions in boxes and bags in the frozen section, stuffed with either oily, heavy cream cheese or bland, greasy cheddar. They are the size of chicken nuggets and they're as interesante as white bread and about as interesting as... pan blanco.

We rocked the boat with Bitchin' Bacon & Beef Bombs last year and I'd been wondering where the next happy appetizer opportunity lay. When I told Julie about my idea to put snack-pack jerky-n-cheese inside a jalapeño with a bread crumb and white cornmeal crust, she said I was being sensationalist... crazy for the sake of being crazy.

I only agreed with her a little.

Near as I could tell – after exhaustive research on the internets and more than a few beers – no one had put these together before. There are a million jalapeño popper recipes, and I couldn't find a single one that had the unholy marriage of a jerky-n-cheese snack-pack stuffed inside. That either meant that no one had thought of it, or someone had done it already and they were really, really, horribly, unspeakably bad. But I couldn't get it out of my head.

So I made them.

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. 

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. 

Pizza: Two proud toppings, one humble goal.

Jalapeño & pineapple pizza from Yaghi's Pizza. © Ryan Schierling

How do you dress your pizza?

On this weekend... Super Bowl Sunday, specifically... more pizza deliveries are made than on any other day of the year. The majority of these orders will no doubt be ubiquitous stand-bys such as pepperoni, or something ending in "-Lovers," but some will be personal or family favorites that are well off the standard list.

We have no plans to join the masses calling for pizza delivery on Sunday, but we do have an unusual front-runner around here. I think it may even be my very favorite.

Jalapeño and pineapple.

I won't lie. I was a little skeptical when Ryan first suggested this pie. The only pizza I had ever heard of having pineapple was the "Hawaiian-style" pizza, and my dis-inclination to eat Canadian bacon never took me down that road. Additionally – let's be honest – we're talking about tropical fruit on a pizza. Umm... hmm... what?! 

The truth is, some of the most outstanding favor combinations in the world are a devilish mix of sweet and spicy. He was right, of course, and I'm a loyal convert. Sharing this pizza with friends has now become a fun little mission – it's like watching my own initial reaction on someone else's face. What begins as a curiously-raised eyebrow turns weeks later into a random phone call or text message proclaiming how the jalapeño and pineapple pizza they just ate is making their world right again.

Now I am determined to share this 2-topping pizza with all of Austin. I mean really... the jalapeño is the official state pepper of Texas, and what better way to keep it weird?

What is your odd or interesting pizza favorite?  Oh, do share...

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.

Oven-fried snack attack.

Midnight crack snack burritos. © Ryan Schierling

This weekend we attended a birthday party. Good people, good times, and - good God - there I found myself on an after-midnight drift in the direction of the food table... 

When hunger kicks in, you naturally gravitate to what satisfies. What kept drawing me back on this particular night was a platter of miniature bean burritos; appetizer-style burritos you could eat in four bites. Nothing fancy about them, just flour tortillas with some refried beans and a little cheese. Um... and probably a load of sodium? I don't know, had to be, though, because these babies were hitting the spot like potato chips on game day. 

I think I ate one too many, because on the way home the little fellas were sitting in my stomach like a tortilla and refrito brick. However, I knew the real trouble had begun when the next morning I woke up thinking "I totally have to make some of those!" 

Taquito-size flour tortillas, a schmear of plain refried beans, monterey jack cheese - plus an obligatory sprinkling of kosher salt, of course. I didn't deviate. Okay, in the name of variety (and because our pepper plants are currently busting out the hot goodness) a thin slice of fresh jalapeno or habanero pepper were added to a few. Where I took necessary liberties was with the cooking method – a magic little formula for cooking burritos with flour tortillas I discovered many years ago, almost by accident.