Buffalo Chicken Dip

Regular gentle readers may recall that while I have zero interest in football, I absolutely LOVE SuperBowl Sunday, ’Mericker's second-eating-est day of the year after Thanksgiving. Every year I look forward to preparing a hot, cheesy, gooey, delicious dip. And whereas on Thanksgiving you don't really want to take too many risks with trying a new recipe, it's really kind of hard to go wrong with any hot-gooey-cheese-and-mayonnaise-based concoction, so I like to switch it up and try a new one every year. The 2013 SuperBowl champion, as far as I'm concerned, is Buffalo Chicken Dip.

This is a delicious mix of all the flavors in buffalo wings, without any of the extra physical exertion of having to tear the meat off the bones with your teeth. Plus you get to skip the empty calories that come with those pesky carrot and celery sticks. Perfect for SuperBowl Sunday, obvi!

There are a lot of recipes for it online, of varying degrees of ewww-ness (who knew chicken even came in a can?). As I often do, I perused several and then came up with my own based on my research. This is SUPER easy to throw together. I guess you could make it even easier by buying pre-shredded cooked chicken instead of cooking and shredding it yourself, but I would totally judge you if you did that.

Sprinkle about 2 lbs. bone-in split chicken breasts (=3 split breasts) with salt and roast at 350° for approximately 1 hour 10 minutes. Let them cool, then shred the meat off the bone, discarding the skin (I recommend reserving the bones to make stock). I roasted the breasts the night before, since I was baking a cake and it was easy just to throw them in with it.

Mix the chicken with:

• 8 oz. gorgonzola or blue cheese, crumbled
• 8 oz. cream cheese (1 standard package), softened
• 1/2 cup Frank’s hot sauce (yes, of course you can use another brand)
• 2 scallions, chopped
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise (or in my case, 8 packets)

Add this to a buttered baking pan (I used a 9-inch round cake pan but you could use anything loosely this size). I realize it's a bit ridiculous to grease a pan before adding a mixture that is itself so grease-filled, but eff it, it's the SuperBowl!

Heat at 350° until it’s all bubbly and oozy-looking. Serve with scoopy tortilla chips. Or you could go for the full buffalo wing experience with carrot and celery sticks, but if you ask me that’s just empty calories.