Sweet and Spicy Peanut Butter Dip

I love happy accidents that result in tasty dishes: tossing in the wrong spice only to discover it tastes better than what the recipe called for; making a last-minute substitution because you're out of an ingredient and finding that it tastes wonderful; completely misunderstanding your mother-in-law's tried-and-true recipe but creating something new and delicious in the process.

Last week my husband and I were pressed for time one evening, and we were hurriedly working together to pack lunches for the next day. We needed to whip up a new batch of dip to go with fresh veggies. I had a printed recipe, which I handed to him after rattling off the short list of ingredients that we needed to pull out of the fridge. He was measuring out some ingredients; I was chopping some other ingredients. He was working from the page I handed him while I was working from memory. We were both tossing ingredients into a single mixing bowl.

Then we found ourselves staring into the mixing bowl, him holding a bottle of soy sauce and me holding the canister of brown sugar.

Me: This doesn't look right.

Him: But we're following the recipe you gave m--oh.

Me: Oh?

Him: That's not the dip recipe.

Me: Oh.

Fortunately for our veggies, the recipe we intended to follow was printed on the same sheet of a paper with a chicken satay marinade. We had commingled the dip ingredients with the marinade ingredients. We made just a few adjustments to finish it off. The result is a wonderful, creamy, spicy dip that would be good on crackers as well as vegetables.

Click here for printable recipe.


Ingredients

• 1 cup smooth, no-sugar-added peanut butter (we use an all natural one that contains nothing but dry roasted peanuts)
• 1 cup plain Greek yogurt
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger, grated
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 teaspoons chili paste
• 2 tablespoons light brown sugar
• juice of 2 lemons

Directions
Mix all ingredients together. Chill. Serve as a dip for fresh veggies.