Food I Love: Spinach Artichoke Dip

This might become a new feature here on my blog because I love food and I love cooking!

I hosted Thanksgiving this year (I know, it's past Christmas and here I am talking about Thanksgiving!) and had everything prepared, but I wanted something for an appetizer. I then thought about all the times I had had spinach artichoke dip with my family and how much we all enjoyed it. So I searched for a recipe and found a great one! (Sorry it's the mobile version of the page...I found it while I was on my cell phone).

My husband then had a company potluck and needed something to bring. My first thought was this artichoke dip! It was quick and easy to make and he could easily bring it to work and heat it up in the smaller crock pot we have!

I started making the dip, but it wasn't till after I was done that I thought of sharing this. So I don't have many process photos, but I thought I'd share the ones I did get!



It all started with this photo. I know I'm weird, but I thought the empty food processor looked really pretty (cool?) with the swirls of white speckled with green!

One of the great things about this recipe is that it is so easy to make! The ingredients are very easy to find as well. You mix in all of the ingredients except for the artichoke hearts in the food processor. After you get that mixed together, you add the artichoke hearts and mix it just enough so that the dip is just slightly chunky. The recipe says to heat the dip in the oven, but we use our smaller crock pot and that works just as well!



The only thing I changed from the first time I made it was to skip the top layer of mozzarella. It might taste different if you bake it in the oven, but when we heated it in the crock pot, I think it took away the flavor of the dip. I'm so glad I made that change because it tasted so much better the second time around!



Oh man...after writing about this, I'm craving it! I might have to make it again real soon! I highly recommend this recipe and I know it'll be a big hit with whoever you make it for!

My Minnesota Story

AKA: My Minnesnowta Story!

First of all, I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while...I just haven't had anything that I've really wanted to write a post about. That all changed yesterday!

If you haven't heard already, the Twin Cities area got up to 21.5 inches of snow this past weekend (December 10th and 11th)! My family and I were not in the cities for this event as we were celebrating an early Christmas at my parent's home in Northern Wisconsin. We only got around 1-4 inches of snow up north and didn't really expect to have any troubles getting home. The snow had ended Saturday night and we knew the MNDOT crews would be working hard to keep the interstates relatively clean.



The drive went very well. We only saw one car in the ditch and one site where a car smashed into some guardrails between my parent's home and where Interstate 35 splits into 35E and 35W. It was south of that split on 35E that we started to notice a real increase of snow on the ground. Then we saw a pickup truck buried in the ditch. Then we saw a semi-truck that had gone off the road as they were exiting. It was very odd to see! We were almost home when we saw two cars buried up to their roofs in the ditch!

We exited the highway and as expected, the city streets were plowed, but not that well. It was very understandable...it was a big storm with a lot of streets to plow! As we pulled into our neighborhood, we saw that they were working on plowing our driveways, but they were pretty far from our house! We got to our driveway and it was no where near plowed! We were debating about going to see a movie when we got home so decided to go out to lunch and a movie to give them time to plow our driveway. We didn't even try to pull into our driveway with the Jeep and were even worried if the Jeep would be able to make it! We wanted to unload the car before we went to our movie so we went about tromping through the snow (which was up to our knees!) from our Jeep on the street to our garage.



We had a wonderful lunch at our local Majors (where we saw the amazing footage of the Metrodome (Mall of America Field) roof collapsing!) and headed right next door to see our movie. With maybe 30 minutes left in the movie, the film stopped and the emergency lights went on! Somehow, our movie theater lost power! Thankfully, they gave us re-admit passes so we can go back to watch the rest of the movie soon.

By that time, we just really wanted to be home, but were doubtful that they had gotten around to plowing our driveway. Sadly, we were right...they hadn't plowed our driveway yet. We then debated about what we wanted to do. I thought we could shovel a bit of the snow to give the Jeep a bit more clearance and then drive right into the garage. I think my husband could tell how bound and determined I was to get home, so he decided to go with my plan. We started shoveling, but know it was going to take a while (and the windchill was bitterly cold!). So my husband decided to give it a go with the Jeep to see if we could flatten the snow a bit so we could get the car into the garage. Well, it took a few tries, but the Jeep plowed right through the snow and we were officially home!

I'm sure there were many more harrowing tales from this great storm, but I thought I'd share my story since it surely turned into much more of an eventful day than we expected! Now I'm looking forward to playing in all of this new snow!!!

P.S. I put together a set of my early Christmas on Flickr.