The Corn Dip Recipe

And a really, really unnecessary backstory to go with it.

First off, this does not need to be a Substack. In fact, it’s saved as a one slide highlight on my Instagram which I feel does a sufficient enough job explaining the recipe itself. Nevertheless, I was thinking of things I haven’t shared here that have done well there and this recipe (along with the breakfast casserole that’ll I’ll tease out in another longwinded post this week) are two things that I’m always asked about and, with it being the holidays and people needing to serve a lot of food I thought…why not?

And yes, like any good food blogger, I’m going to bury the recipe at the very end, passed the personal anecdotes (plus my mom’s dip commentary) that I feel are worthy of noting if I’m committed to dragging this out.

Scroll to the big, bold, CORN DIP text below if you don’t care.

Now that those people are gone, the second thing I’d like to mention before getting to the actual recipe is, while writing this backstory…I realized I had the entirely wrong backstory. I could pivot, of course. It would be the natural thing to do, but now I NEED to share this story, this core memory, despite the fact that it belongs to a different recipe because I NEED to know if anyone else knows what I’m talking about. This has to exist in someone else’s childhood because typing it out made me feel absolutely insane, like I dreamt the whole thing up but I know that isn’t the case. In my heart I know it.

So…despite the fact that the longer this goes the more people drop off…here it goes!

My mom has a total of four recipes (mom, if there are more, I’m sorry but they clearly don’t stand out). Since it was just the two of us, she didn’t need to stress about having a rolodex of recipes ready for her picky tribe of eaters. To be fair, I think cooking for two is sometimes harder than a larger group, especially when you’re as lazy as we were (are).

None of my mom’s recipes are for weekday dinners. There’s the casserole (reserved for holidays) and then there are three appetizer recipes, two of which are dips.

This, as the title suggests, was for The Corn Dip Recipe, a recipe that I have shared many times on instagram, and exists in many peoples lives through their own iterations, but people still message me like I’m Bush from the Bush’s Baked Bean family and act as if I’m revealing a family secret. I appreciate the drama of it all.

The other dip, which I was not going to mention, is The Spinach Dip Recipe. I like The Spinach Dip Recipe just fine, but I’ve never shared it. It’s pretty standard…so standard, it’s on the back of the veggie mix box. Unfortunately, I’ve been attaching the more interesting backstory to The Corn Dip recipe and that’s what I need to discuss here so you’re getting spinach at the end of this too.

Both recipes came to me later in life via my mom’s “coworkers”. I use quotes because my mom’s first iteration of “coworkers” were her mom and sister (they used to run a family antique shop for forty years). No recipes were shared there. Then there’s The Corn Dip and CO. coworkers, traditional coworkers, who come from when she went into brick and mortar retail (and important distinction). Finally, there are The Spinach Dip “coworkers”, the women who came to our house once a quarter to sell from the traveling, high end, clothing line my mom set up in our living room.

This is what I NEED to discuss.

Typing that out feels insane, but it was the 90s, ya know? And these women SHOPPED. The socialized. The wasted hours of the day talk just to then purchase twenty things in the last twenty minutes. One of the racks that was strategically placed along the walls of our living and dining room so you couldn’t see ANY wall space did fall on me once, but it was a solid operation for many years. For some reason, I’m being coy with the name because…I’m starting to get nervous she was apart of some MLM scheme and I didn’t realize it at the time. But, I just googled it and no, DONCASTER was not an MLM. And no, sadly, it no longer exists.

No one asked for more context, but since we’re here (I don’t know HOW I ended up deep in the depths of Doncaster) I needed you all to know what I’m talking about visually with the racks—let me just say, finding these images on Google was just as hard as I expected.

We had the clothes in our house for a week or so at a time and other sellers, the “coworkers”, would funnel in and out bringing their own private shoppers. Two of those coworkers were Dottie and Georgeanne, a mother daughter tag team who would have made the people at Kleinfelds look like amateurs. The Spinach Dip is their recipe, hence this random story!

While putting The Corn Dip Recipe on Substack was the initial point of this post, it quickly became a trip down memory lane, through my own living room and I NEED to know if anyone else had this experience. These clothes traveled across the country several times a year. There were multiple women in the state of Kansas selling this (overpriced??) knitwear, so someone here HAS TO KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT. I need other millennials to bond with over Saturdays where you “needed to play downstairs” because the less fun clients were shopping or a Sunday afternoon where everyone’s favorite was stopping by to gossip for three hours, let me stay upstairs and asked for my ten-year-old fashion advice just to casually drop four figures on chic businesswear.

Either way, that is where A dip emerged, scribbled down in my mom’s cursive on an index card with the eBay and AOL passwords, important (and not important) phone numbers and random math equations/ long division that I’m still not clear on the purpose of. My mom still, to this day, has a random pieces of cardboard, updated throughout the years with endless amounts of personal information on it. It is still in rotation, so much so that, after visiting for Thanksgiving, Bill said “I should have just written it on the cardboard.”

So, all this to say, if you have a DONCASTER story, please message me. If you think my mom worked for an MLM scheme and I’m still living in denial, you can message too.

And if you’d like The Corn OR The Spinach Recipe, see below. Reading these through, I can’t help but laugh that I wrote two-thousand words for two recipes that have one step each.

THE CORN DIP RECIPE: (things capitalized my mom feels very passionate about)

• 2 cans Green Giant STEAM CRISP yellow corn niblets (MUST BE STEAMED CRISPS ACCORDING TO MOM)

• 1 cup mayo

• 1 cup sour cream

• 2 cups (1 pkg) shredded sharp cheese

• 1 sm red onion finely dice - to taste

• 2-3 teaspoons diced jalapeno - careful

• FRITO SCOOPS — THIS is a non negotiable. I don’t care what other chips you like, the strength of a Frito Scoop, the salt content…it’s perfection. And I’m not the only one who thinks so because last holiday season the city of Chicago ran out!

RECIPE

• Mix all together....Jalepeno gets stronger overnight! Refrigerate overnight.

Groundbreaking, I know.

THE SPINACH DIP RECIPE: (spoiler, it’s literally on the back of the Knorr veggie mix packet)

• 1 box (10 oz.) frozen chopped spinach, cooked, cooled and squeezed dry

• 1 container (16 oz.) sour cream

• 1 cup Hellmann’s® or Best Foods® Real Mayonnaise

• 1 package Knorr® Vegetable Recipe Mix

• 1 can (8 oz.) water chestnuts, drained and chopped (optional)

• 3 green onions, chopped (optional)

RECIPE

• Combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix.

• Chill the spinach dip for about 2 hours.

• Serve.

  

Yes, two RIVETING recipes, I know! My career as a food blogger is going to take off from here so be prepared. Watch out Ina.