The best veggie dip

I was not authorized by my mom to post this recipe, so I may be letting the dill weed out of the bag, but I made her famous veggie dip for the first time today, so I thought I'd post it. Everyone loves it. My friend Andrea's fiance even told my mom that he would marry her because of the veggie dip alone, if he wasn't already marrying Andrea. That was weird, but I guess it goes to show what this dip does to people.

She doesn't measure it when she makes it, and I didn't today either, but I am approximating it here. You can adjust to taste.

1 cup real mayo
1 cup real sour cream
1 tbsp dill weed
1 tbsp old bay seasoning
1 tsp garlic salt

Enjoy!

Guest Blogger: Polish Beet Soup

Let the polka begin!  Guest post 1 of 2 for a special Polish feature. Here's the recipe for my Grandma's beet soup, as recreated by my mom.

Zesty Pizza Sauce

I had some tomatoes to use up and pizza sounded good, so I improvised a quick pizza sauce. Worth making again.

I didn't make the dough yesterday as planned, so today I picked up some premade dough from Trader Joe's, which was okay.

Here's the recipe for the sauce.

New camera! Pesto photo shoot

Made pesto tonight - won't bore you with the recipe that I made up that was just okay - but here are some lovely pictures, courtesy of my new camera.

Chicken Pot Pie

Making a pie crust is easy in concept, but hard to execute. You're working with very limited ingredients (flour, water, salt and shortening - maybe sometimes butter or sugar, depending on what you're doing), but those few ingredients are very demanding.

I had a taste for chicken pot pie this afternoon, and I felt like working in the kitchen after being behind a computer all day. A perfect storm. Read the rest.

Delicious lamb chop marinade

The barometer of good food for me lately is: Would I serve this to Anthony Bourdain?

I make so many frou frou cakes and baked nonsense, that oftentimes the answer is no.

But tonight, the answer is yes.

I have always had a soft spot for lamb chops; and indeed, they led to my downfall as a vegetarian. A bite of lamb broke my nearly two year fast from meat, and I haven't really looked back since.

Tom and I bought some chops at Whole Foods last night, and today he found a great marinade recipe. In a nutshell: 1/4 cup white vinegar, 2 tbsp olive oil, a healthy amount of smashed and chopped up garlic, 2 tsp of sea salt, 1/2 tsp of pepper, and some thinly sliced onion.

It seemed like it would be too much salt, and too much pepper. But it was delicious.

It took two passes on the grill to get it from raw to nicely pink.  It was perfect.  I will make this for you when you come to dinner, Anthony Bourdain.

Strawberry Dutch Pancake

I had never made one of these before, and I saw a recipe in the free press that I only loosely followed. I think their oven temps were way off - it said to start at 450 for fifteen minutes and then drop the temperature to 350, but my oven holds the heat like crazy. I would have been better off just cooking it at 350.

They had you make the batter, put 2 tbsp of butter in a pie pan to melt in the oven, swirl the butter around and then pour the batter in.

It rose gloriously in the oven during the first fifteen minutes, and I watched with anticipation. I dropped the temp and kept watching. After ten minutes, the edges were about to burn, so I took it out. Then fell like a brick.

The middle looked like it could have cooked longer.

Still, it tasted ok.  I topped it with diced strawberries, powdered sugar and a drizzle of agave syrup.

Here is the batter recipe.

1/2 cup flour
3/4 cup milk
2 eggs
2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla