Weekend at the Lake

So I'm not cooking tonight because we went away this weekend, came back yesterday night and painted baseboards then cut and installed those baseboards, and then this morning, carpet was put in the guest rooms and the upstairs hallway. So I am tired, there's nothing in the house, and I had to play cat wrangler while the carpet guys installed our beautiful carpet. Check out facebook for pictures - it's beautiful.

But, I do have a wonderful Mother-in-Law dish to share. My mom-in-law makes Paula Dean look like a home cook. She's really quite brilliant. And she made this great appetizer last weekend that I decided to try and replicate this weekend for our friends. Happily, it turned out really well and our friends all loved it! It's pretty simple, but could be more complex depending on how you want to budget your time and ingredients. The appetizer is a cold dip, very festive for the Christmas season if you're interested, and quite delicious.

So it's a layered dip: white, green, white, red, white. My mother-in-law did it in a bowl with plastic wrap on the bottom so she could invert it on a plate. I wasn't feeling so ambitious. So I took two of my corning ware leftover dishes and made it in those plus a pyrex leftover dish. (I made a lot, there were about 20 people this weekend). So the white is a mixture of goat cheese and cream cheese. To make the amount that I did, I used two blocks of Philly Cream Cheese (reduced fat... save a couple calories) and two 4 oz. logs of plain goat cheese (mine had some herbs on the crust of the log to give a nice speckled look on my white). I mixed them by hand using the back of a spoon, which was fine, but I suppose you could use a mixer. Then the green is pesto. You can buy it, or you can make your own (like I did a couple days ago). I couldn't tell you how much I used, but Classico makes a pesto in a small container and I can't imagine it would be much more than 1 of those. And the red is sun-dried tomatoes. I bought an 11.7 can of sun-dried tomatoes and put them in my mini food processor to give them the same consistency of the pesto (and I put in the oil and it was just fine). I didn't use it all, but save the rest and I bet you'll use it at some point - even if only with your leftover pesto on crackers or something.

Then, obviously, you just layer them together. The goat/cream-cheese mixture is easy to layer on the bottom and wicked hard to layer on top of the pesto & sun-dried tomatoes. The pesto & tomatoes aren't solid-solid so it's hard to use a spoon to layer the cheese mixture. I wound up using my hands and molded the cheese like play dough in order to get it to cover the other layers. However you want to do it, though, works for me. It was a delicious dip and when paired with those flatbread crackers or the wheat thin crunchables? So good. Nice flavors, very rich and creamy, you'll love it! And thanks to mother-in-law for a delicious (easy!) appetizer!

Bon Appetit!