Buffalo Chicken Dip

I had this first when a friend brought it over for a party we were having.  It was FANTASTIC, and I still think about it every single day.  I would eat this morning noon and night if I could get away with it.

What you'll need:
1 Pie plate
1 block plain cream cheese (any kind you like)
1 to 2 Cups cooked diced chicken (depending on how meaty you'd like it.  The picture above was 2 cups!)
1/4 to 1 Cup store-bought buffalo sauce
Hot sauce of your choice (optional)
Blue Cheese Crumbles (optional)
Chopped Chives or green onions (optional)
Crackers, chips, celery

Spread the cream cheese in the bottom of the pie plate.  You can use regular cream cheese, low fat, fat free, whipped ... what ever you want.  The whipped will make a lighter dip in texture, and the fat free cream cheese will make it less calories/fat, so choose your poison.

For the chicken, use either leftover cooked chicken, make extra the night before for supper, then use that extra for the dip, use canned chicken, or use the precooked stuff in the deli section of the super market.  It's simply a matter of choice and ease.  You'll want to dice it up into pieces about the size of corn kernels.  These will be big enough to get great flavor, yet still small enough to not load down your chip to the point of breaking.

Find a buffalo sauce that you love.  You can also make your own with butter and hot-sauce, but there's really no need to because there are awesome ones in the store.  Save yourself the pressure of making a sauce to go with this, and just use the yummy ones available to you.  If you don't think it's hot enough, add hot sauce of your choice.

Mix the sauce with the chicken.  Pour a little bit on, see what the texture looks like, see what the flavor is, and add more if you need / want to.  Keep adding until you have a consistency almost like a thick chili.  You want it to be "dip-like", but not soupy, and not dry. 

Pour the sauce covered chicken onto the cream cheese base in the pie pan.  If you think it looks a little dry once you've got the chicken on the cream cheese, drizzle some more sauce on it.  It's your dip, so make it the way you'd like to eat it.

After the chicken and sauce is on the cream cheese, you'll add the blue cheese to how ever much of the dip you'd like.  My husband is not a fan of blue cheese, I think it's one of the greatest things EVER, so I load my half up, and leave his half free of blue cheese.  You can also sprinkle with diced chives or green onions.  If someone in the group wants it more spicy, have the hot sauce of your choice available for them, or make them suck it up and eat it the way you make it. 

At this point, you're ready to go!  Grab the dipping implement of your choice ... cracker, chip, celery stick, spoon, and dig in.  It's really amazing! 

Enjoy!