Previously, on Battledip Galactica...

The ping-pong ball is not a secret ingredient, just the luckiest (or unluckiest) beer pong shot of all time.

My mother had, from an early age, taught me that artificial cheese is a bad thing. In her eyes, it was perfectly acceptable to buy a package of Kraft Singles or a gallon jar of Rico’s nacho cheese at Walmart, but only if you were going to smoke three cigarettes on the ride back from the store in your rusted out 1973 Dodge Dart before returning to your obese wife and 5 kids living in a double wide trailer which doubles as a meth lab. Otherwise, any cheese that didn’t come in a $7 brick with the word ‘TILLAMOOK’ emblazoned across the front was only to be used as a punchline.

So imagine my quandary last year, on The International Day of the Nacho, when my then-roommate and current-Boris Johnson lookalike Jack Brazil came home from the store with a brown bag full of discount nacho ingredients, among them two squat glass jars of Tostitos Fiesta Cheese.

Jack uncorked the two jars and poured their contents into a big glass bowl. The cheese rolled into the bowl like viscous, yellow sludge; pooling on top of itself in folds and layers as it settled. This, I had been taught, was the wrong consistency for cheese to be. If you wanted your cheese in liquid form, you had to buy it solid and melt it yourself – to buy it pre-melted like this left a lot of unanswered questions about how the cheese had originated and who had done the melting.

“Why, uh,” I muttered, watching these seemingly small jars disgorge a veritable Crater Lake of cheese into the bowl. “Why are we putting it in a bowl?”

Jack, no doubt a veteran of many jars of artificial pre-melted cheese, looked at me like I was stupid. “So we can warm it up in the microwave! Duh..”

This cheese was nauseating enough at room temperature; the thought of it slightly warm like a lover’s embrace was not doing it or me any favors. It was so thick that it took ten minutes to microwave it to an acceptable temperature.

And then there we were – me, Jack, and a big, bubbling bowl of what I had been brought up to view as concentrated synthetic evil. I resolved not to have any of it, but somehow Jack changed my mind (to this day I can’t remember how – I imagine he probably called me a fag somewhere in the process) and I dipped a chip into the substance and then deposited the chip in my mouth.

The cheese slithered across my tongue, bland and overly salty, before sliding down my throat like mucus. I pushed the bowl back towards Jack, who was gleefully drizzling the cheese onto his plate of nachos.

“Pfft.” Jack grinned, watching me force back the urge to vomit. “More for me, I guess. Pussy.”

While Jack is accomplished at many things, he is far better knowing every obscure fact about every band in existence than he is at eating two jars of Fiesta Cheese in one sitting, and so once we were finished with dinner we had one and a half jars of Fiesta Cheese in a glass bowl sitting in our refrigerator.

Two days later it was the night before a weekend band trip to Seattle to watch the Ducks crush the Fuskies, and Jack and I were staring at that big bowl of cheese, the last thing left in our refrigerator.

“We should probably throw it out,” he said. “Y’know, in case it goes bad while we’re gone.”*

*In retrospect, the cheese probably had so many preservatives in it that it would outlast me, Jack, any children we might have, and potentially all life on Earth. Eons from now, alien survey parties would land on Earth and the only evidence they’d find of human civilization would be that bowl of Fiesta Cheese. Tasting it, they would no doubt write off our entire race as producers and consumers of sub-par dairy products and go on their merry way.

“No,” I said, my long held aversion to wasting food welling up within me. “Let’s use this cheese. Let’s make it better. Let’s cook with it.”

“What can we make? It’s just a bowl of cheap cheese!”

“We’ll make dip,” I said, turning to the spice cabinet and flinging the doors wide open. “We’ll make the best fucking dip in the history of the world.”

Jack and I proceeded to do just that, employing probably about 60% of the nonalcoholic foodstuffs in the house. Cayenne pepper, chili powder, taco seasoning, red pepper flakes, black pepper, Chipotle Tabasco, Tapatio, and half an onion combined to make what had once been a bland bowl of dairy sludge into a robust and delicious dip.

Jack and I heated the substance up and sat downstairs, playing Halo 2 and scooping as much of this stuff as we could into our mouths on chips.

“What are we going to call this?” Jack asked, gasping for air between mouthfuls.

“Easy,” I said. “Battledip Galactica.”

Like Battlestar Galactica, my dip is intense, smart, powerful, well-written, and a fitting allegory for the global War on Terrorism. Also, none of my other favorite TV shows had applicable names for a dip - Mad Dip? Dippy Howser M.D.? No thank you.*

*In the process of writing this blog, I realized that Arrested Dipvelopment was almost a better choice than the name I went with, but I have no regrets.

I’ve never thought of myself as an especially gifted cook, so it’s been ingratiating for me to see the warm reception Battledip Galactica receives at every band party where I’ve served it. When the trumpet section went to the beach a few weeks ago, I pulled the Battledip out of the microwave just as half a dozen stoners came back inside after herbing up on the back porch. The entire bowl was gone in under 15 minutes.

People have begun to demand Battledip even when I don’t have the ingredients; on Halloween, two people left the party while drunk just to go to the store to buy an onion and some Fiesta Cheese so I could make the dip. When I was done, it was gone in about 20 minutes.

I feel pretty good about Battledip’s popularity, given that it’s got four figure calories and reportedly has given more than one person a horrifying case of Battleshits Galactica the following day.

People keep asking me for my recipe, and I’ll tell you here on the Internet in front of everyone: All you do is pour two jars of artificial cheese into a bowl, and then start experimenting with all your other applicable spices and vegetables. Everything is variable, except the artificial cheese.

Sorry, Mom.

Truman Capps wants to have a Battledip Galactica sampling party where all the guests bring their own versions, but the windows would have to stay open at all times, if you catch my drift.