The Art of Dipping

And now for something a little less serious this week.

Dipping.

A person can't get anything these days without a side of ... dip. At home, we keep bottles of condiments in our fridges to dip everything from fruit to meat to desserts. At restaurants, it either comes with a little container of meal related condiment or you can make your way to the fountain drink area to find little foil packets of everything under the sun.

At McDonalds the other day, my daughter's happy meal came with caramel dip for the apple slices and I was offered a choice of dips for her nuggets... when asked what they had, the server behind the counter rattled off about six, most of which I forgot moments after she said them, and then decided ketchup in it's little foil packet would do. She likes ketchup anyways.

At Red Lobster a few weeks ago, the fish came with tartare sauce, the crab legs with melted butter, the salads with your choice of salad dressing in a little cup on the side, for pouring or dipping depending on the diner's choice.

Buffalo Wild Wings offers around 14 different buffalo wing sauces for their wings, which also serve as dips if you prefer something other than mini chicken wings. My husband bought a bottle of his favorite flavor to take home... Why? To dip his steak in.

Waffles and pancakes come with their own little container of breakfast syrup. Small packets of crackers or breadsticks have dippable cheese. Pizza Hut serves a side of marinara dip with their breadsticks.

Sushi comes with soy sauce and wasabi.

Chip Dip ... ranch, french onion, nacho, spinach... We have an old family recipe in our family for cream cheese potato chip dip with onions. And a friend of mine used to bring over a wonderful eggplant dip with pita chips. And lets not forget good old hummus or if you prefer, Guacamole with your corn chips. I spent thirty minutes the other night trying to decide on the right dip for my corn chips. I settled for a white salsa con queso nacho dip, good but a little too spicey for my taste.

I am a mayonaise-a-holic. If it's dippable, there is mayonaise on my plate.

Vegetable trays come with dill sour cream dip. Fruit trays with vanilla or fruit flavored yogurt.

How about bread dipped in your soup or stew?

Wiki of course has many more than I can think of off the top of my head. I only remembered the ones I've eaten in the past two weeks. But seriously, all this in the past two weeks? Clearly, dipping is more than just a condiment, it's a necessity!

You can't escape it.

Here is a funny tidbit of information... I met my husband at a fondue party. Fondue is an art of dipping!

Even a the age of two, my child requests dip, so much so that I put a dob of ketchup on her plate with every meal now before she even asks.

Dip. Empty calories full of flavor and fat and salt.

I think here, the ultimate question is ... can we eat foods without dipping them? I think some, yes. Salad dressing isn't exactly a dip, although it is used as one here where I live. Ranch being the most popular, it is not only a salad dressing, but a dip for things like breadsticks and deep fried or baked cheese. A couple of guys I knew in high school used to dip their pizza in ranch.

But back to my salad ... I dislike the taste of oil and vinegar based salad dressings such as italian. I think it stems from the tartness/sourness of the vinegar and a long history of hating the smell of vinegar when they used to can pickles at my grandmother's house. So I quit having salad dressing on my salad and went for a straight dash of olive oil, lemon juice, and some pepper. Which clearly goes to show that even if I don't like a particular dressing for the salad, I still need something on it to make it a bit more palatable. Something to bring all the flavors together.

I do like raw veggies, but there is something about being able to dip the veggie that turns good food into even better food. But you have to ask yourself, if raw veggies are good for you, aren't you defeating the purpose of eating healthy food by dipping it in the sour cream or ranch dip with all it's salt, fat, and sugar?

Probably.

But I suppose that doesn't mean we are going to stop dipping. In fact, we'll probably do it more. As soon as we know something is bad for us, we feel guilty but we do it anyways.

I wonder if I can go a whole week without dipping? I'm not sure, but I think I'll try. I wonder if I can even remember that I set this challenge for myself given that it's 0600 in the morning and I've not been to bed yet. The joys of working night shift.

Tune in next week for a blog post recap of some of the more interesting points of the past few weeks since I started this blog and of course, whether not I followed through on my challenge not to dip for a week.