Cooking Adventures: Skinny Buffalo Chicken Dip

I think this is my third “Cooking Adventures” blog. Whoo! But since the others are buried underneath other posts, I’ll say I call this Cooking Adventures because I am no chef. Cooking and I aren’t the greatest of friends. I have issues with timing and modifying recipes because there are a lot of things I just don’t like!

However after cooking more for the last month or two, I will say, it’s been getting better. Less challenging. Ah, cooking challenged. That’s what I am.

So last night I took a stab at a recipe I had been eyeing for about a week and a half, Skinny Buffalo Chicken Dip from SkinnyTaste.com.

It’s a relatively simple recipe! Per the website:

Ingredients:

• 4 oz reduced fat cream cheese, softened
• 1 cup fat free sour cream
• 1/2 cup Franks hot sauce (or whatever hot sauce you like)
• 1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese
• 1 tsp white wine vinegar
• 2 cups (14 oz  raw) cooked shredded chicken

Directions:

Mix the first 5 ingredients together until smooth. Add the chicken and put this in the crock pot on low for 3-4 hours. Serve warm.

My recipe ended up not including everything in this one. First, I’m not a huge fan of super hot hot sauce–so I bought Kroger’s mild wing sauce.

Then, the second thing I tackled was the chicken. I have chicken in the freezer, but the thought of thawing it and shredding it just didn’t seem very fun to me…so I figured I would look at the store to see if I could buy any sort of shredded chicken. That’s a negative. In hindsight, I could have got a rotisserie chicken but I didn’t. I was a little pressed for time and went with the canned chicken. Back to that in a minute.

Going back to “things I don’t like,” I’ve never been a fan of bleu cheese, so I didn’t buy that. Later on as I scrolled through the comments, I discovered I’m not the only one who doesn’t like bleu cheese and found out you can substitute with cheddar cheese. I threw in a four cheese blend I had on hand, it probably messed with the Weight Watchers points but I wasn’t counting last night.

Everything else I had on hand or bought…for the most part.

I started to make it last night, and I have this super bad habit of not reading the full recipe before I make it.

So I’m plugging through, leaving out the bleu cheese and replacing it with the four cheese blend, then realizing I had distilled white vinegar instead of white wine vinegar, so I left that out too.

I shredded my chicken then went to see what to do for cooking it and it said to let it go in the crock pot for a few hours.

Wait, a few hours!? I’m making this dip for my dinner…which is now!

Thankfully, I scrolled through the comments and saw I could also cook at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes. (I also saw I could swap cheddar cheese for bleu cheese).

I actually ended up leaving it in there for almost 25 minutes, perhaps that’s because I covered it with tin foil so the top didn’t burn.

All in all it ended up tasting good! Not the greatest, not the worst. My boyfriend thought the sauce I picked up was a little weird.  I liked it, but that’s just a difference in taste. He ate it anyway.

Also, I could really tell a difference with the canned chicken. It recommends you not do that, so I won’t do that again. You can just tell. Next time, I’ll shred my own. It’s all learning!