Every year for New Year’s Eve we have a themed movie marathon with coordinating foods, music, games, and snacks. We started out doing decades (I wrote about it for The Kitchn years ago) then moved into themes like Hawaii, Westerns, movies with numbers in the title, and so on. I have the recipes I posted from NYE over the years tagged here for easy reference—I haven’t posted recipes every year but you can get an idea of what we’ve been up to.

This year is, of course, a year like no other. At least we are used to celebrating at home! We decided to really lean into it and do movies about the end of the world/the apocalypse. Why not? We decided to focus on food we could make primarily from shelf-stable ingredients and/or food with long expiration dates. I didn’t want to go too extreme and wanted to make food we actually want to eat (so no canned chili as an entree) and approached the recipes thinking about what would I make if all I had was what I already had at the beginning of whatever catastrophic even occurred. It’s really not that different than how I’ve been approaching meals since mid-March as I’ve tried to shop very infrequently.

I haven’t been shopping in over three weeks so I really am working off what lasts the longest at this point. For this dip, I took my inspiration from straight up dip mixes and used dried herbs, onion, and garlic instead using fresh (although fresh onions and garlic do store well) and used cream cheese and mayo (both of which frequently have expiration dates six months out or more) and a long-lasting, drier cheese, Parmesan.

I caramelized my onions for onion dip years ago so using dehydrated onions in the dip did give me pause but you know what, the dip was delicious. Dehydrated onions can really pack a punch in a dry rub and the same is true here. The dip was very full-flavored and we ate it all in an embarrassingly short period of time. I tried a few different things dipped in but the most successful was pita chips.