Recipe For Dips With Spicy Pepper

Dip Ingredients:

8 medium size red bell peppers, seeded and chopped
Assorted vegetable dippers like peeled carrots, baby corn, pea pods, yellow summer squash sticks, zucchini slices, and red sweet pepper strips
2 small onions, chopped
15 ounce cream cheese, reduced fat
4 teaspoon olive oil
4 tablespoon lemon juice
½ cup water
½ cup mayonnaise based dressing, low fat
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoon prepared horseradish
Dash of hot sauce

Method:

1. Combine approximately 1/3rd of the chopped red peppers along with chopped onions and water in a food processor or a blender. Blend it or process it to get a smooth paste. Add the remaining red peppers small amounts at a time, preferably in two batches and blend to get a smooth paste.
2. Remove this blended vegetable mixture in a fine sieve to drain off excess water.
3. Combine mayonnaise dressing, cream cheese, horseradish, oil, hot pepper sauce, lemon juice and salt in a medium bowl. Mix well, preferably beat with an electric mixture on medium speed. Add the blended vegetables to this mayonnaise and spice mixture. Cover the bowl with a plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator for 4 to14 hours.
4. In an insulated cooler with ice packs, tote vegetable dippers and sweet pepper shells. For better presentation you may even spoon the dip into sweet pepper shells. Serve with breadsticks or/and vegetable dippers. This recipe makes 2 servings. This recipe can be made in just 30 minutes but the chilling time in refrigerator may need pre-planning.

Health Tip:

• This is a low calorie, diabetes friendly recipe.
• One serving of kickoff pepper dip provides about 45 calories, 3 gm carbohydrates, 3 gm total fat and 1 gm protein.
• This recipe can be an ideal choice for people on weight loss diet, low carbohydrate diet, low sodium diet, low fat diet and low cholesterol diet.
• One serving of kickoff pepper dip provides about 9 mg cholesterol and 104 mg sodium.
• Red peppers are an excellent source of vitamin C and vitamin A, both of which are potent antioxidants which help to scavenge free radicals from the body which cause oxidative stress.
• The nutritive value for this recipe is true only if you stick to low fat or reduced fat cream cheese and low fat mayonnaise based dressing. If you use full cream versions then the fat, cholesterol and total calories of the recipe will increase automatically.