Ingredients:
8 oz cream cheese, at room temperature
3/4 cup chopped Dill Chips (Farmer’s Garden® by Vlasic®)
1/3 cup sour cream
1 oz (fresh) dill, minced
1 shallot, minced
1 teaspoon mustard powder
1/4 teaspoon celery seed
1 teaspoon lemon zest
freshly ground black pepper

Directions:
Place the pickles in a food processor. Pulse 1-2 times. Add the remaining ingredients. Pulse until smooth. Refrigerate 1-2 hours prior to serving.

Notes: reduced fat sour cream and Neufchâtel are fine in place of full-fat sour cream and cream cheese. If you don’t have a food processor, finely mince the pickles and mix by hand.

My thoughts:

I love pickles. I can them all the time but cucumber pickles can be tricky-despite being the obvious go-to pickle variety, home canned pickles are often a little floppy and tricky to flavor. I don’t know what it is; I like the ones I’ve made and they taste great but more often than not when I am looking for a cucumber pickle I just buy store bought. The fact that pickling cucumbers are oddly tricky to find in large enough and cheap enough quantities to have it make sense to can myself well, I’d rather just pickle something else 90% of the time. So when Vlasic asked if I’d be willing to develop a recipe using their Farmer’s Garden variety which were already a particular favorite of mine, I was happy to do so. They are shelf-stable (not found in the refrigerated section) so I was initially skeptical when I tried them a few months back but I was won over. They feature locally grown cucumbers, whole cloves of garlic, carrot slices and peppers in the jar which gives them a homemade flavor.

I wanted to create something fun and July 4th-picnic-worthy so I came up with this dip. It is the perfect dip for pickle lovers who like me frequently snack on pickles and the more casual pickle-eater like my husband who loved this dip! I had never had or heard of pickle dip before but why not! I made it super dill-y by using the dill chips and fresh dill and the flavor is sort of like an extra dill-flavored ranch. Yum.

Vlasic is doing a contest now, click here to enter! And try the pickles themselves using this $1 off coupon.