French Onion Dip

Last Sunday I posted on my Facebook; "I woke up this morning with a craving for hot dogs, chips, and beer. Go better sports team!"

I don't really care much for potato chips unless they are coated in french onion dip.

Staring at the soup mixes at the supermarket, pulling all three "french onion" powdered soup mixes off of the shelf, reading the ingredients, I began to reflect on how much different my diet is from the average person. Learning all the ingredients that are suspect to contain gluten is difficult and just something I'm not interested in doing. I mostly only eat things when I know what the ingredients are, whole ingredients, none of these crazy preservatives, colors, or flavors...not even "natural flavors". This is probably something everyone should be doing. I'm not militant about this, I still eat convenience store candy and drink Slurpees sometimes. That said, I didn't buy any french onion soup mix to make french onion dip. I did buy some potato chips, sour cream, organic hot dogs, and Bard's Beer. I had an onion at home and wondered how hard it is to make french onion dip without the mix.

As it turns out, it's actually really easy to make french onion dip. It's almost as easy as opening a little bag of powdery maltodextrin/MSG/nasty laden dried up onion. I think it's tastier and you actually know what you're eating...hmmm....weird.

I didn't watch the Super Bowl, instead I read part of "Boy Writers: Reclaiming Their Voices" by Ralph Fletcher. A pretty decent book that raises some good points about how schools are short changing boys by fitting their writing into a model that embraces girl behavior over boy. I feel like this happens a lot in schools which is unfortunate because the boys have so many funny ideas and what they think is just as important as the girls. I'm beginning an ongoing comic book unit soon and hope that this can be a tool to help the boys feel that their writing is valued.

For French Onion Dip:
1 large yellow onion diced into small pieces
16 oz of sour cream
2 tablespoons of canola oil
2 tablespoons of mayonnaise
1 tablespoon of finely chopped rosemary (optional)
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
salt and pepper to taste
Heat the oil in a seasoned cast-iron or other non-stick pan, put all of the diced onions in there. You want to caramelize the onions which means they'll be in there until they begin to brown and you can expect your house to smell like delicious onions for a day or so. This should take about 15 minutes on medium heat and you'll want to stir it every few minutes.
Let your onions cool a bit, it's okay if they're warm, you just don't want them hot.
Mix the all the ingredients up and put in an airtight container for about an hour and then nom 'till your heart's content.