Sweet As Pie: Trisha Yearwood's Hot Corn Dip

This month (well, June, and it's still technically June for another 86 minutes) with Sweet As Pie, we had three recipes and a bonus.  The recipes were Hot Corn Dip, Country Quiche, Brown Rice Greek Salad, and a bonus of banana pudding.

The first two were both from Trisha Yearwood's Food Network show, and were my picks.  The other two I tried to make, I really did, but I wasn't feeling super motivated.  Unlike my friend Kristin (or my husband, for that matter), I don't like banana pudding.  Actually, unless they are mashed into cake or bread or sliced and served in Cheerios, I don't really care for bananas at all.  And brown rice just is not my favorite texture in the world.  I did buy the ingredients, I promise ... but I never quite mustered up the "I will make this for dinner tonight" motivation.  So, we were two-for-four this month.

(I'm kind-of okay with that, considering that in the past YEAR we've been almost zero-for-all.  The I-will-do-everything-I-commit-to part of me is distinctly not okay with that, but the Hey-you-can't-win-'em-all part of me is celebrating that I made anything at all this crazy year.) 

But this post is about the hot corn dip.

I picked this recipe this month because about 13 years ago, when we first built our first house in Georgia, we were invited to a Super Bowl party where I devoured (devoured!!!!) a corn dip that I would not have eaten if I had known it was a corn dip, but which I couldn't get enough of before I knew that little fact.  When say I loved it, I mean it.  There was one night months later, that I remember making the dip and sitting in the driveway of friends of ours, all of us circled around just being social, and I put the bowl in my lap with a bag of chips and ate it.  All of it.  For no reason except that I could.

My friend Paige still talks about "that night Jen ate corn dip for dinner."

So hopefully you get the idea: I am a glutton.

Well, yes, but my point was, I was intrigued by a new recipe for a different corn dip.  And a hot corn dip, to boot!

Here's the scoop.  (Bwah hah hah, I crack myself up!!!!)

Hot Corn Dip

Verdict: Not bad!  If you like corn dips, this will satisfy -- but it could stand a kick-up in the spice department.
Cook it again:  Probably ... it will depend, if I am craving a corn dip, on what is in the house.
Cost factor: $10-ish?  Could fluctuate depending on cheese prices and what you have in the house.  That is just the dip -- you also need chips.

Where was Mexicorn my whole life?  I don't know if this is one of those things I never had growing up because my parents don't eat spicy food and were afraid of this, or if it, like bite-size Snickers bars, did not exist for some unknown unGodly reason.

In any case, this recipe is ridiculously simple.

First, pour yourself a nice tall glass of ice cold Moscato.  There's not a single knife to break out in this recipe, so celebrate the fact that your fingers are safe.

Then, take two cans of Mexicorn and two cans of chopped/diced green chiles.  Drain them both and combine them in a bowl with a cup of mayonnaise, 2/3 of a cup of grated Parmesan cheese, and 2 cups of grated Monterrey Jack cheese.

Why yes, that is el-junko Parmesan cheese.  For a dip, I wasn't breaking out the good stuff.  And no, I didn't remember to include the may or the Monterrey Jack here.

 

Mix it all up, and spread it in a baking dish you've greased.  I just used Pam spray.  

See that mayonnaise-y glob on the left?  That's the dollop from the last few bits I got from scraping the bowl. 

Bake at 350 until the edges are bubbly and starting to brown.  This took us about 40 minutes.

These are cell phone snapshots and I put them both here because they were both equally bad the same quality.

Serve!  A food stylist, I am not.

Also I may have eaten half the chips I put on this plate before I took the picture.

This is a satisfying hot dip, but I wouldn't say it's anything amazing.  As you can imagine, the flavor was dominated by the corn -- as it should be for a corn dip, right?  (That sounded stupid, but Food Network Star is on in the background and I'm trying to be specific in my descriptions.  You know, taking a little advice from the experts and all!)

I was hoping the diced chiles would give it a little more bite than they did.  This dip was not spicy at all, which was disappointing and surprising.  I said earlier that I wasn't sure if I would make this again, and what I meant was that this dip is similar enough to the other dip that I make -- with just enough differences in ingredients --  that it would come down to what we had in the house rather than an outright preference.  However, if I did make this again I would try to use fresh peppers (serranos would be my preference) to kick up the heat a bit and make it a little more flavorful.

I'm going to post the other corn dip recipe in a separate post.  If you make it, please tell me what you think!

--Jen

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