peppers

Truth be told, I’ve been a little obsessed lately with Roasted Red Peppers. They’re showing up everywhere… dressings, salads, recipes everywhere. I’ve even been stashing a few to try, including the one below.

Holy Hannah! This dip blows away any other dip that I’ve made. It’s got just 1 cup of sour cream, but gets a LOT of volume from canned roasted red peppers (in water.) It also picks up a TON of additional flavor from basil and cilantro… Seriously amazing.

I can’t wait to hear what you guys think when you try this one. I made it on Sunday night with my veggies, and REALLY wished there was a way to capture that delicious scent in this post.

Where is scratch and sniff when I need it? You laugh, but it’s coming… but hopefully, it won’t be applied to all those sweaty workout posts I see around the web.

Roasted Red Pepper Veggie Dip

From Weight Watchers

Serves 10

INGREDIENTS

1 cup reduced fat sour cream

1 (15 oz) jar roasted red peppers, packed in water, drained

1/4 cup basil, fresh or in a tube

1/2 tsp. garlic powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. black pepper

2 tsp, cilantro, fresh or in a tube

INSTRUCTIONS

1. In a food processor or blender, combine roasted peppers, sour cream, basil, garlic powder, salt, and pepper. Puree until smooth.

2. Add cilantro to the mix and pulse again. Note: The original recipe indicated this could be a garnish, but I just whipped it into the dip.

3. Serve with your favorite veggies and enjoy!

Per 1/4 cup serving:

CAL 38; CARB 3g; FAT 2g; PROT 2g; FIB 0g; WW Points Plus: 2

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Mustard BBQ Sauce

Over the past few weeks during my food preparation, I realized that I have two techniques that I use when prepping veggies that are TOTALLY worthy of sharing.

These are super-simple tricks you can add into your repertoire and feel like a genius when you do it (or something like that!)

Slicing Bell Peppers

I slice bell peppers almost every weekend to use for my snacks during the week. There’s a trick I use, that I think works wonders in creating clean, uniform peppers. Here’s how you do it:

1. Wash your pepper, and then cut off the TOP and the BOTTOM of the pepper.

2. Make a vertical cut in the pepper and then open it up so it lies flat.

3. Take your knife and run it horizontally along the pepper to remove all of the spines, seeds, and whatnot in one swoop of the knife!

4. Cut your peppers and they’ll be without those weird bends and extra white stuff on them. So easy!

Roasting Beets

This is actually something I just learned! Roasting beets used to be kind of a pain. First, you have to scrub the beet, then peel it, then chop it, then roast. You’d also have to find a way to get that red stain off your hands too that happened during the process.

The NEW technique that I’m using now is simple and brilliant. I roasted two beets in this manner this weekend, and have been adding them to salads all week. PERFECTION.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Scrub your beets. They don’t have to be perfect, but because they’re a root vegetable you’ll want to get some of the dirt off.

2. Place the beet in a piece of tin foil and wrap it up. Note: Do not add oil or salt and pepper. You can do that after you’re done if you need it. I prefer them just roasted, and I don’t think they need them in ANY way.

3. Roast each foil packet in the oven for 30 minutes to an hour at 400 degrees. Note: I used HUGE beets, so I cooked them for an hour, but you want them to be easy to stick a fork in to be considered done. Very similar to baked potatoes.

4. Open the foil packet and grab some paper towels.

5. Use the paper towels to easily rub the skin from the beets, exposing its beautiful beet colors. Note: Remove any deep crevices or eyes that might be in the beet. I also sliced the top off the beet to remove the remains of the stalk.