Pantry Recipe of the Week

We are completing Week One of the Eat from the Pantry Challenge. So far, so good. I'm trying to avoid having to do all my experimenting at the end of the month, so I tried a new recipe this week. It was a turkey casserole that used up a stuffing mix I had on hand, and it was pretty tasty.

But it's not the Pantry Recipe of the Week.

I've got one that's even better.

See, the challenge this week was that I have to provide an appetizer for a holiday party we're attending tonight. Fortunately, I still have a few special ingredients on hand because of the holidays, including a can of artichoke hearts. So it was off to supercook.com to see if I could eke out a spinach artichoke dip, since I have some frozen spinach too.

Supercook.com lets you pick what ingredients you have on hand and turns up recipes for you. I like it better than allrecipes.com or any other recipe search I've tried. It pulls in recipes from everywhere, and you can "store" your pantry contents there, so you don't always have to re-enter staple ingredients like butter, flour and milk.

My search turned up several different versions of spinach artichoke dip. I'm not a mayonnaise fan, but I was a little short on the alternative ingredient of cream cheese or sour cream, so I had to do a little substituting. And I substituted my way to a winner. I will never order spinach artichoke dip at a restaurant again. You might not either!

Here's the recipe:

Hot Spinach Artichoke Dip
• 1 (8 ounce) package light cream cheese, softened
• 1 (5.2 ounce) Boursin garlic and herb cheese, softened
• 1/2 cup light sour cream
• 1 (14 ounce) can artichoke hearts, drained, chopped
• 1 (10 ounce) package frozen chopped spinach, drained and thawed
• 1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese

Directions:
Beat cream cheese, Boursin and sour cream with electric mixer on medium speed until well blended. Add remaining ingredients, mix well.

Spoon into 9-inch pie or quiche dish. Bake at 350 degrees for 20- 25 minutes or until very lightly browned. Serve with pita chips, tortilla chips or veggies.

The Boursin garlic and herb cheese makes this a real knockout. Unless you don't like garlic. And then I'm not sure we can be friends.
 
OK, we can still be friends, but warn me about your aversion to garlic before you come to dinner, would you?

Here's our supper menu from the rest of the week. We ate leftovers for lunches.
 
Sunday - Chicago style spinach pizza
Monday - Turkey pot pie (filling from the freezer), lettuce salad
Tuesday - Roast turkey breast (from freezer), mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans
Wednesday - Leftover turkey and pot pie
Thursday - Corn and Turkey Casserole (leftover turkey, stuffing mix and creamed corn from pantry)
Friday - Wild Rice Soup (leftover turkey, wild rice from pantry)
Saturday - Hot Spinach Artichoke Dip and pita chips to take to the holiday party

Total groceries purchased: $0

You can see that our meals certainly are not suffering during this challenge. At least not yet!

I will have to head to the store next week since we've been out of bananas for 4 days now and I'm nearing the end of my available fruit and milk. Challenge or not, I still have to feeding growing little bodies well-rounded meals!