Cerberus, The Three-Headed Dip

So I'm back in black, babies!

Campy horror movie night was a success and a blast and a gorefest and a laughfest, all rolled into one. And man do I have recipes out the ass. Prepare yourselves.

We ended up laughing our way through two different horror flicks, Bloodlust, which features the dad from The Brady Bunch, and The Killer Shrews which is no doubt one of my all-time favorite campy horror flicks. It features dogs with added fur cloaked over their backs to look like "killer shrews." It features an unbelievable amount of alcohol consumption--my friend Mo pointed out, quite brilliantly, that this would make an awesome horror flick for a drinking game... If you drank one shot or a few gulps of beer every time someone in the movie did, you'd be quite lit very very quickly... please note this suggestion. ; ) And it features some of the funniest (and unintentional) one-liners ever ("I don't believe in asking questions, it's against my principles" and "I'll take a dull, alive woman any day"). Much too much fun.

I decked out my apartment to the brim with Halloween decorations (I love Halloween and I've built up a good collection, but I did venture out to the Halloween store for more over the weekend, including a sweet skeleton-hand punch ladle--woot woot).

I also couldn't resist the fake-blood at the store (especially when I checked the ingredients and realized that--apparently--it was vegan), so I of course had to zombify myself for the evening, grossing people out with the blood smeared all around my mouth and in my hair.

And the goodies were plentiful and enjoyed by everyone. As I mentioned last week, I whipped up everything from various dips to veganized witch's finger cookies (which were a success, folks!) to black punch complete with a frozen ice cube hand, so expect lots of recipe gems this week.

To start us off, I shall share with you the Cerberus of chip-dips I made for the party, from the boring to the sublime.

On the boring end of the range was the spicy peanut dip from The Garden of Vegan. I even added extra peanut-butter to the dip, and it still did nothing for me, which was a bit disappointing. It just tasted potently tofu-ish. And clearly other folks felt the same, seeing as it was relatively untouched at the end of the night. I'd stear clear--I'm sure there are plenty of other good dips in that recipe book to make use of instead.



For my second dip, I tried out Courtney's Smoky Chipotle and Black Bean Dip from Fat-free Vegan and it was quite quite good. I consumed way too much of the leftovers while zombied out (no pun intended) in my pjs in front of a movie yesterday in a post-party stupor. I made no variations to the recipe, but it DID end up inspiring me to make my own black bean salsa (whose recipe I'll post in a moment).

Smoky Chipotle and Black Bean Dip

INGREDIENTS:

• 1/3 c. green onion, thinly sliced


• 2 t. garlic, minced


• 2 t. cumin


• 1 - 15 oz. can black beans, drained and rinsed


• 1/2 c. water


• 1/4 c. freshly chopped cilantro


• 2 T. lime juice


• 1 T. freshly chopped oregano


• 1 t. chipotle chiles in adobo, pureed


• 1/4 t. salt

DIRECTIONS:

In a small non-stick skillet, sauté the green onions and garlic for 3-4 minutes or until softened. Add the cumin, sauté 3 additional minutes or until fragrant, remove from heat, and set aside. In a food processor or blender, combine the green onion mixture and the remaining ingredients, and puree until smooth. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed, you can also add more chipotle puree if you like spicy flavors. Serve with tortilla chips, crackers, or veggies.

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For the final of the three dips (and my favorite), I whipped up a black-bean salsa of sorts. It turned out SO fricking tasty that it even surprised me, and my friend Joe fiendishly consumed most of it during the course of the night and lavished it with compliments, so I suspect I wasn't the only one who thought so.

Black Bean and Corn Salsa

INGREDIENTS:

• One 15 oz. can of black beans, drained


• 1/2 a can of corn


• About 1/2 a 28 oz. can of diced tomatoes (or a 15 oz. can would work just as well, obviously)


• 3 cloves garlic, minced


• 1/4 c. chopped cilantro


• Juice of one lime

DIRECTIONS:
Mix all the ingredients together. Let sit for at least an hour so the flavors mingle. Serve.

This final recipe is so fricking simple that you'll be amazed out how good it tastes.

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As for the rest of the week's recipes, I promise to post the finger-cookies recipe sooner rather than later as I suspect some of you may very well be throwing your own Halloween galas this upcoming weekend. So stay-tuned for tomorrow's post.

Sweet-Potato Dip

One of my favorite things that I made for the wine-tasting on Saturday was a variation on the Maple Potato Spread from the PCRM recipe database. I made quite a few variations to the recipe though, so I'ma repost it here...

(Makes about 2 cups)

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 large sweet potato, peeled and quartered


• 1 small onion, sliced


• 1 tablespoon tahini


• 1 T+ vegan brown sugar


• 2 dried figs, finely chopped (the recipe calls for 3, so you may wanna use this instead, I just accidentally got the wrong amount)


• Soy milk

DIRECTIONS:
Steam sweet potato until soft. Toss the onion into a pot and caramelize it (cook it in a bit of oil until it's soft and starting to brown, toss in about 1 t. of vegan sugar and mix around, continue to cook until it is a rich caramel color and then remove from heat). Place all your ingredients into a blender and blend until mixture is thick and smooth. Very gradually add soy milk until the thickness is to your liking. The amount of brown sugar you use may vary as well--more if you want it sweet sweet and less if the sweet potato's doing all the work for ya. Let cool before serving (tastes best after having sat in the fridge overnight and eaten cold). Serve with original (non-honey-ed) Nabisco graham crackers.

Road-Trip Noshes

So as I mentioned, I was in VA Beach this past weekend, which meant no cooking. However, I did manage to whip up a few goodies for the car-ride down. I had some pesto, cilantro, celery, and a jalapeno that were near the end of their lives, so I decided to utilize them so they didn't rot in the fridge over the weekend and made the following.

Pesto Pasta Salad

Macaroni Noodles
Pesto (preferably homemade)
Vegenaise (or some other vegan mayo)
Walnuts
Diced celery
Dried cranberries

Coat the noodles in a mix of pesto and mayo to taste. (If you make the pesto yourself, you may wanna just cut back on the amount of oil you use so your mouth doesn't feel like an oil-slick after you finish chowing down.) Then toss in the remaining ingredients, also to taste, and EAT IT ALL WHILE SITTING NEAR PORT-A-POTTIES AT A REST STOP WHILE A BIRD LANDS ON YOUR TABLE JUST INCHES AWAY AND TRIES TO STEAL SOME OF YOUR FOOD!

Black Bean Dip



1 small can black beans, drained (liquid reserved)
1/2 of remaining liquid
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1 large handful of cilantro
Juice from 1/2 of a lime
1 jalapeno, deseeded and diced

Throw all of the above into a food processor and BLEND THAT SHIT UP! This was a yummy recipe, but not nearly as spicy as I would've liked it to be (despite it being a fairly large jalapeno), so I'd recommend throwing in some cayenne pepper as well. Unless you're a wuss. You're not a wuss, are you? Huh, wuss?

Eat while driving through Pennsylvania or Maryland with a nice bag of Fritos Scoops. Well, not the BAG itself, but the Fritos inside. Otherwise that would probably taste like crap.

Speedy Roasted Red Pepper Hummus and Cornmeal Chips

Yesterday, inspired by the Shiny Happy Hummus recipe over at Fat-Free Vegan and struck by the notion of an oil-free hummus (which pleased me since I like my hummus thick and chunky anyways) and upon receiving an email recipe from my friend D for a Turbo Hummus that also sounded quite good, I decided to try whipping up something of my own (with some homemade cornmeal chips to dip).

This is the fastest recipe I've made in a while. It was so fast I almost wet myself. But I didn't. But then I almost did again when I got giddy at the fact that I got it all done in the amount of time it took for my laundry to swish its way through the wash-cycle. But then I didn't. And then I stopped for a moment and thought perhaps all the near-accidents might be a result of a bladder-infection and not just excitement and that perhaps I should go see my doctor. But then I didn't. Instead I just went and used the potty.

SPEEDY ROASTED RED-PEPPER HUMMUS INGREDIENTS

1 small can (10.5 oz or so) of chickpeas (drained, liquid reserved)
1 small roasted red pepper
3 cloves of roasted garlic
1 t. natural peanut butter
Dried basil
Cayenne pepper
Salt
Pepper

Place chickpeas and garlic into a food processor. Pulse until it's a bit too dry and trying to escape the blades. Toss in your peanut butter and gradually add half of your reserved chickpea liquid. Continue to pulse until creamy. Add Dried basil, cayenne pepper, salt, and pepper to taste. Slice up your red pepper and add about half to the mix. Pulse until it's blended well enough (but with a few tiny chunks still floating around). Add to taste (I only added about 1/2 the red pepper. Voila. Oil-free hummus.

While my cats wrestled inside my heater-box, I whipped up the cornmeal chips...

Cornmeal Chips Recipe: HERE (by the way, this recipe only yields about 20 of these chips, despite alleging it makes 30)

Apparently this was an aphasia-recipe for me, because I kept f-ing everything up: I grabbed the wrong measuring cup when adding the cornmeal into the water and had to wing it (after trying to quickly do mathematical conversions and figure out how much more needed to be added if the recipe called for 2/3 cup and I had accidentally added 1/2 and if Sue was on a train coming from Phillie that left at 5 pm and Roger was headed from Brooklyn on a train that left at 2pm what time they would meet up and how much cornmeal would they tell me to put in the goddamn rest of the recipe--and then giving up and remembering that I no like math). Then I somehow decided the recipe called for the oven temperature to be at 350 rather than 375 and couldn't quite figure out why they were taking so goddamn long to bake. I only realized this retrospectively.

Anyways, all in all, making everything in both of these recipes took me about 40 minutes. And I think I even managed to do the dishes before the timer went off for my laundry. So this is a nice, simple recipe if you wanna whip up something last minute for visitors, say. The chips did not come out as chiply as I had hoped, but I think this was probably because of my oven-temperature aphasia--they still taste pretty good but some are a bit moist and chewy in the middle. But hey, they're homemade. And the hummus is nice and roasted red peppery and doesn't give you that greasy-slick feeling that oily hummuses do. I still think it needs something more to give it a bit more oomph, but we'll see how it is at lunch today and whether the flavors have mingled and danced and screwed into one big copulative pleasure-overload of flavorfulness last night. Will keep you posted...

UPDATE: Chips have gotten chewy overnight. They are incredibly flavorful, but they have the chewy consistency of jerky. Meh!

VERDICT: Hummus--B, Chips--B