Jalapeño and Cilantro Dip

This is Elissa, Kathleen's oldest daughter, in my first ever blog entry! I'm actually pretty jazzed because about a month ago I was telling my husband how much I'd love to write a food blog, but don't have the time... or know if I'd be any good at it. So now I can drop in when I have the time (and remember to take pictures) and contribute to my Mom's blog. I've been an avid blog reader for years, and have recently discovered a few new ones thanks to the magic of Pinterest. So here we go...

I really love Mexican food, and have been privileged to learn many of my sweet mother-in-law's amazing family recipes. I won't post any of those without her permission, but I am fairly certain that she will enjoy this dip when I see her at Thanksgiving. I stumbled across this recipe on Pinterest, and unlike so many recipes you find there, it needed very few tweaks to be amazing.

Jalapeño and Cilantro Dip

Ingredients

6-8 jalapeño peppers

1 bushel of cilantro

1 cup mayonnaise

1 cup sour cream or Greek yogurt (I recently unknowingly fed my kids recalled Chobani yogurt so I'm still a little iffy towards it and used sour cream)

1 package Ranch dressing (3 tablespoons if you buy it at Costco like many good southerners)

Directions

1. Wash cilantro and jalapeños. Remove seeds from jalapeños and roughly chop. The original recipe says to include the seeds if you want a spicy dip.

**Word to the wise - REMOVE the seeds. Raw jalapeños are plenty hot without them. You can always add "heat" to a dish later, but you'll destroy the cilantro flavor if you leave the seeds in. I cook with fresh jalapeños a lot, but the only recipe that I leave seeds in is my MIL's hot sauce, which is so good that it's life-changing, but not for the faint of heart. I also recommend wearing gloves while you handle the peppers.**

2. Food process jalapeños and cilantro until it forms a paste. 

3. Mix the paste, mayo, sour cream and dressing mix.

See? I've read a lot of food blogs. Mad props to those bloggers who make the ingredients look so beautiful in these pre-mix photos...

4. Refrigerate dip for at least an hour and enjoy! It's great with chips, as a dressing on burgers, as a dressing on salad, or veggie dip. Seriously, today we had it with burgers and chips. Tomorrow I'm making a southwest chicken and black bean salad and using it as the dressing. Yum!

 

So there you go, whip this up sometime and see what you think :-) EV