Who doesn't love a nice, warm, cheesy spinach dip? Great for parties and technically can count as a vegetable because there's spinach in it! Just kidding. It doesn't count as a vegetable but it should! This recipe reminds me of the time I used to be in catering at UCLA and we used to feed the football players. They wouldn't eat vegetables so we would put cheese sauce over them and it worked! There's no need to bribe anybody to eat this dip. It's a crowd favorite.
Here's what you need:
Any kind of cheese
12 oz. bag frozen spinach (don't use canned)
garlic
medium onion
8 oz cream cheese
milk
dash of tabasco sauce
dash of worcestershire sauce
Ready, set, GO!
I use frozen spinach. You can use fresh, but you would need to steam it and strain it if you use fresh. That's just an extra step that delays me from eating this dip as fast as I can get it made so I stick with frozen. Plus, with frozen, what you see is what you get. You'd be surprised how much fresh spinach it takes to make the amount you'll need for this recipe. This is a 12 oz bag of frozen spinach.
It looks like this:
I pour the spinach out into a strainer and just let it defrost in my sink. If you're in a rush, you can heat it in the microwave or rinse it with cool water. I'm not in any rush so I just let it hang out in my sink while it defrosts.
Meanwhile, I take a medium sized onion and dice into small pieces. If you cut them too large, they kind of stand out in your dip. You can use as much onion as you want. I like onion, not everyone does so I used half of a medium onion for this recipe.
Over medium heat in a heavy saucepan, I added about a tablespoon of olive oil.
Add your chopped onions and sauté.
You don't really want to brown your onions here, but if that happens, that's okay too.
I like to cook them until they are soft and translucent.
Then I add a heaping tablespoon of fresh, chopped garlic. Mmmmmm. Garlic.
At this point, I lower the heat to medium low. I don't want to burn my garlic.
Nothing tastes worse than burnt garlic. Yuck!
Hey! Remember our friend spinach? I think we're ready for him.
This is how it looks all nicely defrosted.
Give it a nice squeeze to get as much of the water out of it as you can.
Then plop it in with the onion and garlic.
After a quick stir up, it looks like this.
I turn the heat back up to medium and add about half a cup of milk. I always start with a little bit. If you need more, you can add more. But if you start off with too much then your dip will end up watery.
At this point, I add just a bit of seasoning salt. I usually add black pepper here too. But the cheese I happen to be using today is a white cheddar with black pepper so I didn't add any pepper today.
Now it's time to add your cream cheese.
I just plop the entire brick into the saucepan.
After just a few minutes, the cream cheese melts down and it looks like this. I have a hard time at this point not eating this as is. It tastes like creamed spinach. You can turn it back down to medium low. Be careful that it doesn't splatter on you. It's HOT.
The beauty of this dish is that you can literally use any kind of cheese you want or have on hand. I've used mozzarella, Parmesean, Romano, or any combo of cheese works too! You can't go wrong! I happened to have some of this kind of cheese on hand:
I got it on sale and it lived in my freezer for a little bit. The reason why I like to freeze some cheeses is that after it defrosts, it cuts into these nice crumbles like this:
Add as much or as little cheese as you'd like. I used 2/3 of this 8 oz block. But don't feel any guilt if you add more than that. This is all about what makes you happy.
In fact, in lieu of salt, I opted to put in a bit of parmesan cheese, see?
If you wanted to add artichokes, now would be the time to do so.
Just open and drain a can of artichokes, give them a rough chop and add now.
We're almost done! I add a healthy dash of Worcestershire sauce
and a dash or two or three of tabasco hot sauce.
Why are we adding tabasco and Worcestershire? Because this dish is so creamy, we want to add a little bit of acid into it. You don't have to add this, but it really brings this dip together. Believe me, you won't taste the tabasco in this with all the cheese and creamy going on.
I happened to have some chopped scallions in my freezer (did you know you can chop and freeze green onions and use them when needed while cooking? You can!) so I added a little bit.
You can eat right away, but I like to let it cool, refrigerate and re-heat up the next day. You can just reheat it easily in the microwave. Letting it sit over night gives the dip a bit of time to marinate and get all yummy. Enjoy with tortilla chips, pita chips, ritz crackers, veggie sticks or spoon directly in your mouth. Just kidding (but not really). This dip is a win-win!
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