I had a few friends over for New Year’s Eve and I decided to make a spinach dip.  I have a little recipe book that I write my favourite recipes or ones that look really great that I want to try one day.  Finally I tried the spinach dip.  It turned out amazingly good!  We had crackers, purple corn chips, and veggies to eat it with.  I preferred the purple corn chips, but it was nice with the others too.

Next time you are having some friends over or going somewhere that you need a finger good to take, I highly recommend this appetizer!  You can even make it fancy by cooking it in pumpernickel bread.  That is how it is originally suppose to be done, but of course I left it until the day off to find bread and I wasn’t going to drive 20 minutes just for one thing.  So as you can see it can also be made in a dish suitable for the oven.

The Recipe:

2 pkg (250g) cream cheese softened
1 C                grated cheddar cheese
2 tsp              dill
1 C                mayo
1/4 C             diced onion
1/2 C             bacon bits
1 pkg             chopped spinach
1 large round loaf of pumpernickel bread

1) mix cream cheese, cheddar cheese, dill, mayo, onion, and bacon bits together.
2) Put spinach dip in the pumpernickel bread (with a knife cut out or pull out a majority of the centre of the bread and cube the leftover bread for later).  Wrap in foil.
3) Back at 325 for 1 hour.
4) Serve with leftover cubed bread or any kind of tortilla or corn chips, or crackers.

Note: If you do not have pumpernickel bread, place into a casserole dish or other oven safe dish.  Do not cover and keep same cooking temp and time.

Unfortunately I can’t have this recipe again for another few months because I am following a new dieting program (Follow my series starting with Dukan Diet: Intro and Attack Phase)  But we can actually have most of what is in the recipe during our second phase with some modifications.

Things that need to be modified:
The cream cheese needs to be fat free.  We have been finding it difficult to find no fat cream cheese in Canada, but they have it in the States.  We are heading there at some point before our third phase so we will definitely be picking some up while we are there.  We could use light cream cheese, but fat free would be better.

The cheddar cheese also needs to be fat free or maybe by this phase we can have low fat or regular cheese (I’ll have to double check on that one).

We are not allowed to have mayo (I don’t even think in the third phase – another thing to double check) but Greek yogurt is a great substitute for mayo or there is a recipe for Mayo in the Dukan Diet book.

Bacon bits are a no because we can’t have real bacon!  But we could make our own bacon bits with chicken or turkey bacon, which we are allowed to have.

No pumpernickel bread on the second phase, but we can have some whole wheat grain bread on the third phase!  But the dip is really good with veggies anyways which we can have after we are done the first phase.

Things we can have without modification:
Dill, onion, spinach.

I think on the third phase we can have this without as much modification, but I would have to check on that.  For sure I will be able to eat it on the fourth phase, because that is the phase for life.  You will hear all about it when I start it.  But not until then… except for maybe some hints here and there!

Don’t worry, eventually when I get into the other phases my Tuesday post won’t revolve around the Dukan Diet.  I don’t want you to get sick of hearing about it!  If you want to hear about it then look for my Friday posts, which will be a weekly update on my progress of the Dukan Diet.

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