Vices: Chips and Dip

This is the first post in a series about the foods that got me into trouble over the years. I hope to explain my relationship with these foods so I can better understand why I binged on them.

I can't remember the first time I ate chips and dip but I imagine it may have been at one of the many parties my parents and the three neighbours they had on their short street hosted. It was the seventies when I was a kid and neighbours liked to party with neighbours.

There were lots of New Year's Eve parties, wedding anniversaries and "it's a hot night, you should come over" parties. Many of them included chips and dip as the central, if not only snack. Perhaps I associate chips and dip with happiness, happy people, or, more likely, happy parents. But that's a whole other blog post, or a whole other blog. Or perhaps a book I have yet to write.

Philadelphia cream cheese dips by Kraft were all the rage. Onion was my favourite, but just about any flavour got my happy-endorphins flowing when the creamy paste hit my taste buds. A salty, fatty potato chip alone is enough to make that happen, adding a creamy high-fat dip to the mix became drug-like.

Chips and dip eventually found its way into our home on non-party occasions. It may have been used as a treat for me when I was left alone, babysat by my older brothers. Or on Christmas Day and other holidays as a family treat, often consumed mostly by me. It became my favourite "food" in the whole world.

Soon I devised ways to get this heavenly treat all by myself by taking in pop bottles for refunds or convincing my parents to buy it at the grocery store every once in a while.

Both my parents worked and my neighbours were very close to my family so I'd spend a lot of time with them. One evening, when over playing with another kid, I was treated to home-made chip dip, made with whipped cream cheese, a splash of milk and chopped onions from the garden. I had never tasted anything so good. The kid whose mother made it got to use her fingers to clean out the bowl at the end. I was envious.

This image looks to me as a favorite drink might to an alcoholic.

I quickly moved to making my own dips based on this recipe, sometimes with onion but mostly without any added flavouring. When I could get my hands on a block of cream cheese and a bag of potato chips, and had the house to myself, it was a party of one. It was an intimate, sensuous session of freedom and gluttony. I was probably only nine years old but the recipe and the habit has followed me to this day. I've even decided as recently as a couple years ago that chips and dip would make a fine meal to be consumed alone in my car in a grocery store parking lot.

I usually serve chips and dip when entertaining. In the last decade I've combined flavoured cream cheese such a chive and onion with a little milk and whipped it up with an electric mixer, sometimes adding a little sour cream or mayo. It's very good and without exception has received rave reviews from my guests. You can't go wrong serving chips and dip, I always say.

Yet I somehow rarely allowed myself to have chips and dip in the last fifteen years. If I was entertaining, that was one exception, or if I was at someone else's house. But, like Peanut Buster Parfaits at DQ and chocolate milkshakes, it was forbidden by me. Still, so many other things weren't that should have been. I'll talk about those in future posts in the coming weeks and months.

But a kid whipping up his own chip dip and consuming the whole thing by himself with a large bag of potato chips was a kid destined to be an obese adult.