Spoooooky Southwestern-Style Dips

For this challenge, Myrtle and I united our mad cooking skillz and created appetizers for our annual Spookyfest. Every year we invite a bunch of friends over to watch two scary movies for Halloween. However, this year we only made it through the first movie (A Nightmare on Elm Street) and learned the scariest truth of all; that we are too old to stay up past Midnight on a Friday night. Sigh.

Anyway, I made this recipe from Emeril. My friend, Kristen, chopped the peppers for me and did a kick-ass job. She chopped them sooo fine! I would have been super lazy and would have made them much thicker. But it made me realize that laziness doesn’t pay in the kitchen; the tiny pepper pieces ruled. I also recruited Eva to grate the garlic for me. Although it wasn’t as mind-blowing as Kristen’s chopped peppers, I’m giving her a shout-out for the effort. Thanks guys!

The cheesy hot corn goodness was a hit.

Over to you, Red!

Amy’s choice of her corn and cheese-tastic dish (which, by the way, yum) inspired me to look for a good black bean dip as a complement. I decided to go with this recipe for Texas Caviar, but with black beans instead of black-eyed peas. The main reason why I went with this version was it was pretty much the only one I found that called for you to make the dressing yourself instead of just dumping a bottle of Italian dressing on the beans and veggies. Since this is Poff-Coff, I figured the more from scratch the better, right! Well….

When I mentioned to a foodie friend of mine that I made Texas Caviar, his first response was, “It always gets too watery. Maybe I just don't do it right.” Nope, that pretty much sums up my experience too. If I was going to make this again, I would definitely cut back on the oil and vinegar. Or, perhaps the beauty of Italian dressing from a bottle is it is thicker than homemade dressing and you don’t have that problem.

Also, next time I am totally taking advantage of Kristen’s pepper dicing skills.

All in all, it didn’t turn out bad, but it paled in comparison to Amy’s yummy dish, and couldn’t even stand up to the guacamole that I also made. But the three dishes together worked out well and I might try it again. Plus, Poff-Coffing as a team is fun!

This is Amy again. Erika’s Texas Caviar was freaking good. Erika left it at my house after Spookyfest, and I totally ate it like 50 times as a snack. Also, we made burritos two days later for dinner, and we put it on the burritos and that was really awesome.

My jack-o-lantern and Misha really enjoyed it, too.