Buffalo Chicken Boxes

Yeah, this was a weird thing that happened, gentle reader. Look, I figured the Pats are probably practicing for the Super Bowl, so I should too.

So I made a trial run of my fave Super Bowl dish, buffalo chicken dip—using the leftover shredded chicken from recently documented chipotle tacos; a squirt of sriracha; and a couple ounces each of cream cheese, crumbled gorgonzola, and shredded jack. I know. Weird.

Then I lined one of these weird little box-shaped dishes that my mom got me for Christmas a couple of years ago with a flour tortilla, and then I added maybe 1/4 cup of the chicken mix and crimped the tortilla edges over it.

Then I baked it in the toaster oven at 350° for maybe 15-20 minutes until the crimped edges of the tortilla had nice brown highlights, and plopped some sour cream and salsa onto it.

I took a risk on this weird little box, but it turned out pretty darn delicious. I can only hope that my other Super Bowl boxes will pay off like this one.

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.

7 Layers of Kevin Bacon Dip

I’ve already expressed how much I enjoy the Super Bowl from a food perspective despite my utter apathy about football. But this year, with the big rematch between the Pats and the Giants, I have a real reason to actually get excited about the game itself…yes, MADONNA is performing!!! (Hehehe, I can’t wait to hear what Alyce has to say about that one… No, but seriously, I'm pretty excited about Madonna.)

For this year’s Super Bowl party at Fredna’s place (that would be Rob’s Aunt Edna and Uncle Fred, who are kind of like the Brangelina of Super Bowl parties), I’m planning to bring a mash-up between seven-layer dip and the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, and make a contest out of it—since it's a day for betting, after all.

The game plan (see what I did there?): I printed up sheets with a multiple-choice quiz, and everyone who ponies up $1 fills out a sheet matching the layers of the dip to the movies they represent. Either one person will get the most answers correct, or we do a random drawing from the entries tied for most correct (even if that number is zero). Surely this will be a fun gaming alternative for people who don’t care/know enough to bet on the actual football game. Download the quiz to play at your own Super Bowl party!

Here are the dip layers (in top-down order, 1-7), which, in a nod to the original “degrees” game, symbolize six of his movies, plus a bonus layer honoring Kevin himself. Can you match up which layer symbolizes which movie?

Quiz answers and explanations, as well as dip assembly instructions, after the jump.

7 Degrees of Kevin Bacon Dip (layers in top-down order)
1. Bacon
2. Spicy cheese
3. Corn
4. Sour cream
5. Ground beef
6. Salsa
7. Navy beans

And, emphatically not in order, since that is the whole point, the movies those layers represent:

a. Footloose
b. Diner
c. Friday the 13th
d. Kevin himself (seriously, if you don’t get this one…)
e. A Few Good Men
f. Wild Things
g. Apollo 13

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Answers, in top-down order:

Super Bowl Munchie: Red Bean Dip

No, I didn't make this, nor are we affiliated with those who did. It's just awesome. Insane ultimate Super Bowl dip recipe by Holy Taco; get the how-to here.

My co-blogger Alyce and I are most definitely kindred spirits. But since we human beings are all unique, just like everybody else, even the B-est FFs are bound to have certain points of divergence on tastes. Ours, in a word? Football.

See, Alyce believes the point of football is to enjoy the thrill of the game (I assume, anyway ... I never asked, because I get bored as soon as the F-word is uttered). She totally represents for the knowledgeable, engaged, passionate-to-the-point-of-cuckoo female fans (this article seriously pissed her off), and I admire her for it.

However, I have a very different take on the point of football. For me, gentle reader, it means enduring a long winter of Sunday afternoons of endless, tedious Spandex-clad scrums (how the Jets game the other week trumped Mariska’s Birthday Marathon of SVU in The Rob’s priority system is beyond me) in order to reach the second greatest eating day of the year, after Thanksgiving: the Super Bowl.

Ahhh, the ’Merickan glory that is the classic Super Bowl spread: Pigs in blankets. Buffalo wings. Kielbasa. Nachos. Pizza. Spinach-artichoke dip. Seven-layer dip. Sundry other dips. Requisite accompanying chips. And beer...so, so much beer. The $25,000 Pyramid category here could just as easily be “Things That Make Kitty Happy.”

Anyhoo. This particular bean dip is super-easy, and makes a large quantity on the cheap (it's easily multiplied for a crowd). And it's actually relatively non-fat-laden, at least as far as Super Bowl foods (or, again, things that make Kitty happy) go.