Chili Cheese Dog Dip

The Hendersons three doors down had their annual Memorial Day cookout in the front yard on Sunday afternoon, with the folding table and the homemade banner and the thirty cousins from McAlester they have every year. They invited us. Mama said yes on Tuesday in passing, when Mrs. Henderson stopped her in the driveway, and Mama unsaid yes on Saturday morning, when she was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the calendar in her head and the social math she does once a week. Mama looked up from her coffee and she said, baby, I am not going to that cookout. And I said, okay. And that was the end of the planning.

I want to write about that decision because it is part of why I cooked what I cooked on Sunday, and because I want this notebook to be honest about how holidays work in our house, not how they look on the front of a Hallmark card. Mama does not love crowds. Mama does not love walking into a cookout where she is going to be asked, three different times by three different cousins-of-strangers, what her husband does for a living, and where she is going to have to explain that the husband is not currently a participant in the marriage. Mama loves her own kitchen, her own back porch, her own quiet. And Memorial Day, this year, she chose her own.

So Sunday afternoon I cooked us our own version of a Memorial Day dinner, and I cooked it on a $9.65 budget that I had been quietly building for two weeks, and I cooked the kind of dish that I do not think most cooking magazines would print but that I have decided I want my notebook to make room for anyway. I made chili cheese dog dip. I want to walk you through it, because I think there is a particular kind of recipe that does not get the dignity it deserves on the internet, and this is one of them.

Chili cheese dog dip is a hot pan dish, baked at 350 in a 9-inch pan, in four layers from bottom to top. Layer one is cream cheese, softened to room temperature and spread across the bottom of the pan with a spatula like frosting. Layer two is canned chili, the kind with beans, dumped over the cream cheese and spread to the edges. Layer three is sliced hot dogs, cut into half-inch coins and arranged in a single layer. Layer four is shredded cheese, mexican blend or cheddar or whatever you have, sprinkled to cover the top. You bake the whole thing for twenty minutes at 350, until the cheese is brown at the edges and the bottom is bubbling. You serve it with a bowl of corn chips. The corn chips go in scooping. The chili goes up scooping. The hot dogs come along for the ride. The cheese goes stringy when you pull it up out of the pan, which is a thing that delights people and is a thing that I think pretends to be ironic on the internet but is not actually ironic in real life. It is just delicious.

I want to tell you about the budget for this dinner because I always do. A brick of cream cheese on sale at Aldi was $1.49. A can of Hormel chili at Walmart was $1.69. A package of eight Bar S hot dogs at Dollar General was $1.29. A bag of mexican blend cheese on sale was $1.89. A family-size bag of Tostitos Scoops was $1.79. And I bought, as a treat, a six-pack of generic strawberry-flavored sparkling water from Dollar Tree for $1.50, because we were having a special occasion and Mama deserved something with fizz in it. Total cost: $9.65 for an entire holiday dinner for two people, with leftovers, with sides covered, with the equivalent of a special-occasion drink.

I served it on the back porch. We have a back porch that is technically more of a small concrete slab with two folding chairs, but it is what we have. The Hendersons’ party was loud at the front of the street, with somebody’s radio playing what sounded like Toby Keith, and three or four kids running through the front yard with bottle rockets that were probably illegal but that nobody was going to call about on Memorial Day. We were quiet at the back of the house. The honeysuckle on the fence was in full bloom and the smell of it was filling the whole yard, and Mama and I sat in our folding chairs with the chili cheese dog dip on a TV tray between us, scooping chips into the pan and not saying much.

Mama looked across the yard at the magnolia tree that has been in this yard longer than I have been alive. The tree was not in bloom — magnolias bloom earlier in spring, the white flowers come and go in three weeks — but the leaves were the deep glossy green they get in summer, and the branches were swaying in the kind of late-afternoon breeze that we do not always get this far from the river. Mama said, this is the kind of Memorial Day I needed, baby. And I said, I know, Mama. And she said, I do not have to talk to anybody right now and that is the kind of holiday I have been needing. And I said, that is what we made. And she nodded.

The dip was good. I want to put that in writing. The cream cheese on the bottom does something the chili by itself does not do — it adds a richness, a tangy creamy base that holds the chili in place and makes every bite cohere. The hot dogs were not the fanciest hot dogs, but cut into coins and baked into the chili they take on a different texture, almost like a sausage chunk in a stew, and they hold up better than I expected. The cheese on top went brown and crisp at the edges and gooey in the middle. The corn chips were perfect for it. I have decided this dish is going on the permanent rotation list, which is the list at the back of my notebook of dishes I now know how to make and trust myself to make again.

Cody came home at six. He came around the side of the house through the gate, smelled the dip from twenty feet away, sat down on the porch step, ate four chips’ worth, and got up and left again. He did not say anything. He did not stay. But he ate. He sat down with us, on the same porch, on the same Memorial Day, and he ate. I am keeping count of these moments the way you keep count of pennies in a jar. They add up to something even when each one looks small.

The Hendersons’ party went on until almost eleven. We were in bed by nine. Mama in her room, me in mine, Cody wherever Cody went. The pan was washed and back in the cabinet. The leftovers were in the fridge for tomorrow. The sparkling water cans were rinsed and in the recycle bin. The honeysuckle was still going on the fence in the dark. We had a Memorial Day. It was small. It was ours.

The recipe is below, exactly the way Host the Toast wrote it. There is nothing fancy about it. That is the point. It is a recipe that holds up at a kid’s birthday party and at a Sunday football watch and at a Memorial Day for two on a small concrete slab in Broken Arrow with the honeysuckle in bloom. Make it. Eat it warm. Do not apologize for what it is. Some recipes are not pretending to be something they aren’t. They are exactly what they are, and that is the whole reason they work.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 35 minutes | Servings: 8

Ingredients

1 lb ground beef
1/2 medium yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 can (15 oz) kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 can (10 oz) diced tomatoes with green chiles
2 tablespoons tomato paste
4 beef hot dogs, sliced into thin rounds
8 oz cream cheese, softened and cubed
1 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese, divided
1/4 cup sour cream
Cornbread, tortilla chips, or crackers for serving

Instructions

Brown the beef. In a large oven-safe skillet over medium-high heat, cook the ground beef and diced onion together, breaking the meat up as it cooks, until no pink remains, about 7–8 minutes. Drain excess fat.
Season. Add the minced garlic, chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, salt, and pepper. Stir to coat and cook for 1 minute until fragrant.
Build the base. Stir in the kidney beans, diced tomatoes with green chiles, and tomato paste. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 8–10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the mixture thickens slightly.
Add the hot dogs. Stir in the sliced hot dogs and cook for 3 minutes, until they are heated through and beginning to absorb the chili flavor.
Melt in the cheese. Remove the skillet from heat. Add the cubed cream cheese and 3/4 cup of the shredded cheddar. Stir until fully melted and the dip is smooth and creamy. Stir in the sour cream.
Finish and serve. Sprinkle the remaining 1/4 cup of shredded cheddar over the top. If desired, place under a broiler for 2–3 minutes until the top is bubbly and lightly golden. Serve hot directly from the skillet with cornbread, chips, or crackers.

Nutrition (per serving)

Chili Cheese Dog Dip — Memorial Day for Two on the Back Porch