Ma Niche : artichoke

I grew up in a small industrial town in West Bengal, India, where, in the 80's Mayo was a fancy ingredient to cook with. in fact as far as i remember the Mayo bottles did not make their appearance in the featured cupboards of our grocery store till the mid 90's. but that never stopped my mom from trying out the dishes using Mayonnaise which she used to bookmark from her collection of cookbooks and magazines. she simply made her own fresh mayo every time she needed it. and that was the only mayo that i knew of while i was growing up. her mayo with boiled potato, eggs, mustard sauce, sugar, salt, pepper and a FULL cup of oil. MMM...mmm it was delicious and made her dishes, specially her macaroni so special... so.. even when the commercial Mayo started flooding the local stores, at home we stuck to her recipe. it was that good. and i am sure you'll do the same once you have tasted it..

anyhow when i started cooking, to cut down on the calorie count, i substituted a thing or two and made my own mayo recipe. which is, if i may say so, as delicious. substituting potatoes with sweet potatoes helped me cut down on the added sugar a bit, replacing eggs with Greek yogurt changed the taste but made it an eggless mayo which i could serve to my MIL and i heavily cut down on the oil for i thought 1 FULL CUP was way too much.... so that is how the Spinach-Artichoke dip with Sweet Potato Mayo came into being... We had it in our sandwich along with cucumbers and olives and it tasted darn good. Even Mr MN who has a thing against Artichokes said it was good. and believe me he is not one of those who are loose with their compliments. so a dish really has to be good to score points with him... and this one did :)

since this was my first experience of cooking with artichokes, i found this pictorial tutorial of how to prepare artichoke hearts useful. the rest of the recipe was a mere simple adaption from this one. now over to the recipe...

Recipe Adapted from here.

ingredients

1 cup frozen chopped spinach, thawed

2 artichoke hearts, chopped

1/4 cup cream cheese

1 cup Parmesan Cheese

2 cloves of garlic, grated

homemade sweet potato mayonnaise

for the Sweet Potato Mayonnaise

1/2 cup boiled sweet potato

2 teaspoons mustard sauce

3 tablespoons Greek Yogurt

1/4 teaspoon of pepper

2 teaspoons of sugar

salt to taste

5 teaspoons olive oil

what i did.

i preheated the oven to 375 degrees F.
then adding all the ingredients for the mayo, except olive oil, in the blender i pureed them. then whipped the mixture while gradually adding the olive oil into it until it achieved a creamy consistency. that was my mayo.
i then combined the mayo with the rest of the ingredients and put the mixture to bake for 20-30 minutes.

now that the dip was ready, i diced my olives and cucumber...