If you enjoy healthy Mexican – Southwest cuisine I have two recipes you will want to make. What a bonus that they are easy – using ordinary pantry ingredients and are pretty low calorie so you can easily fit them into your food plan. Beans which are the basis for both recipes are so healthy, filling and taste good too! Feel free to use canned beans or dried beans that you cook yourself. Check out my favorite foolproof slow cooker beans recipe – you don’t even have to soak them! My regular grocery store doesn’t carry dried garbanzo beans but the Indian or Middle Eastern stores do. I picked up a bag but haven’t tried making them in the slow cooker yet. It’s on my ever growing list of things to do.
Years ago I made this dip several times but then I lost the recipe and since I couldn’t remember the name of it I couldn’t find it. That is until a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled across it on the Cooking Light website. This time around I made a double batch.
Since fresh tomatoes are not too flavorful this time of year I used drained, canned diced tomatoes. Works like a charm! The onion and garlic is sautéed with a little water. Serve this warm, room temperature or cold. Make your own baked corn tortilla chips or just heat them up and serve with the dip. I love them that way! The bean dip is also perfect on top of a salad, tucked in a warm corn tortilla or use some romaine leaves for fun tacos!
Tex Mex Black Bean Dip
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1 (15 ounce) can black beans, drained and rinsed
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1 tablespoon water for sauteing
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1/2 cup chopped onion
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1/2 cup chopped tomato (or drained canned diced tomatoes)
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1/3 cup picante sauce, mild, medium or hot
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1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
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1/2 teaspoon chili powder
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14 cup fresh cilantro
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1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
Heat water in a medium size nonstick pan over medium heat, add onion and garlic and sauté about 4 minutes or until tender. Add beans, tomato, picante sauce, cumin and chili powder. Cook for about 5 minutes or until thick. Remove from heat, add cilantro and fresh lime juice, stir to combine. Serve warm, room temperature or cold.
Yield: Approximately 1 2/3 cups
Recipe adapted from Cooking Light 1997
I found the original recipe for Green Chili Hummus here on Food.com and tweaked it to my own taste. The idea of a Mexican/Southwest hummus was so intriguing and you know what? It works – this is amazing with home made tortilla chips or as a topping on a taco salad. The flavor of the green chilies, garlic, red pepper, lime juice and cumin with the garbanzo beans is fantastic. To really keep the calories in check serve it with some veggie dippers like baby carrots, celery, jicama and red pepper strips. Yummy!
Green Chili Hummus
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1 can Garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
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1 -4 ounce can Fire Roasted Diced Green Chiles – mild
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3 garlic cloves
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1/2 teaspoon cumin
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1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper
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juice of 1 lime
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Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Put all ingredients in a food processor or blender (I used my Blendtec on the dip setting) process until smooth and creamy. Chill or serve at room temperature.
Yield: 1 1/2 cups
Recipe adapted from Green Chili Hummus Dip on Food.com
After enjoying the black bean dip and hummus as appetizers we also used them as part of our taco salads. I prefer sturdy Romaine lettuce for taco salads as it can hold up to all the toppings and it has its own crunch factor so you don’t even need chips.
These look great, Tami! Just you know me and sodium, so I never use any mix with it in there.
No way was a five mile walk 1000 calories in my opinion, unless it was a vertical climb.
Think of it this way, 1000 miles is a ten mile run. Did it feel like that? Normally it’s 50 calories a mile walking.
I am very glad you are able to walk five miles, however!!
Hi Dr J! Well by dinner time that night the Fitbit said I had climbed the equivalent of 130 flights of stairs and a total of just over 12 miles which included all of my daily activities and exercise. We had to hike to where our car was parked! I have my daily calories set at 1200 right now and it said I had earned an additional 1000 with my daily activity – I changed what I wrote in the post to reflect that. Of course I didn’t eat an extra 1000 calories!
Tami, several months ago on a different site the blogger was using some calorie measuring device that gave results that I questioned. She said I was wrong because the device was right! Not long after that she started to gain her lost weight back because she was eating based on those numbers.
She apologized to me eventually. I just don’t want you to be fooled by these faulty measuring devices. That’s why I like to use real life examples like running which is 100 calories a mile, etc.
PS: Like the scale at a grocery store which always weights you light because they want you to but more food there, lol!
Tammy, so glad you got outside & enjoyed!! How wonderful for you!! YES, a triumph!!!! Looking forward to warmer weather here this weekend!
Not a bean fan but your recipes always look delish!
I hope you do get some warmer weather for the weekend Jody. The sunshine and warm temps make such a difference. Not everyone likes beans but we love them!
Oh, I know you were glad to get out and enjoy the sunshine, fresh air and exercise! Sometimes that’s the best medicine of all!
It’s amazing how much difference there is in walking on a treadmill (or in my case, a sidewalk) and walking on a trail. All sorts of different muscles come into play.
You are so right Cammy – every leg muscle hurts! Walking with any variance in elevation makes a huge difference. It was indeed good medicine. I can’t wait to go again. 🙂
seriously I always imagine living with you would be FOOODIE HEAVEN.
LOL! Well we do eat pretty well around here Miz!
So glad to hear your healing continues. You are right about muscle soreness – my upper back and shoulders have been super sore after shoveling the 3 feet of snow we got last weekend!
For New Years I made my black eyed peas for Hoppin’ John in the slow cooker and decided right then and there I’m never doing them any other way!
Shoveling snow is such hard work Helen – I wonder how many calories you burned doing that? I have only had black eyed peas one time recently in a restaurant and found them to be delicious. I will have to put them on my list of things to try making. The slow cooker makes easy work of cooking beans.
So glad the healing continues to go well Tami!!! And yummy looking recipes. Have a wonderful Thursday.
OMG, I love the idea of the green chili hummus! Can’t wait to try that one. Yep, just a little incline makes all the difference doesn’t it? Glad you are getting back on your feet – figuratively and literally! 😀 Happy Valentine’s Day!
That bean dish looks good – think I’ll try it soon. So happy you were able to be back on the trail and believe me, I understand about the muscles. I walked around 2 hours a day while in Florida, but that did nothing to help me on my first hiking days in the mountains. I’m still working on building the stamina I lost.
Glad someone else mentioned that the calorie burn seemed a little high. I’ve notice that with other people mentioning calories burned using FitBit. I don’t understand how that works and am certainly not being critical. Guess more curious than anything. But I do know this…my Omron pedometer doesn’t register that I’ve burned 1,000 calories after a ten mile hike in the Smokies. I think you and I both use those types of tools with discretion, but I can’t help but feel that there are lots of people out there who put a lot more stock in those numbers thinking they’ve burned an incredible amount of calories, but get discouraged because the scale doesn’t reflect adherence to that “formula.” Or they eat those calories they think they’ve burned and get discouraged when the scale shows a gain.
I don’t know….food for thought I supposed!
Hi Sharon!
The extra Fitbit calories were not just from our hike, my daily calorie limit is set at 1200 right now so when I have a very active day Fitbit tells me I can eat more and that day I earned 1000 calories over the 1200 I have it set for. Does that make sense?
When you look at the on line calculators that calculate calories burned for activities there is a wide variance in them. Walking up and down hills carrying a 10 pound day pack, using walking poles which means you are also working your upper body burns a lot more calories than walking on a flat treadmill
When I walk 5 miles on my treadmill which I did this morning at a speed of 3.2-3.5 it says I burned around 300 calories and that was with no elevation but it took me about 94 minutes to complete.
Now when we hiked last weekend it took us about 4 1/2 hours (not counting the 30 minutes we sat to eat lunch) to hike 5 miles with elevation thrown in there. That has to burn a lot more calories than walking on the treadmill but exactly how much is a mystery to me.
Yes of course we just use the Fitbit to keep a general track of our steps for the day how many flights of stairs we climb and how many of the hours out of the day we are active. Its just another tool to keep us aware of the need to keep moving.
I think hubby also uses an app on his iPhone that tracks our hikes with elevation and I think it gives him a calorie burn as well. I will have to ask him about that.
It’s so great to back outside! But we sure do have some more work to do to get our bodies back into hiking condition!
Happy hiking to you!
I hope you don’t mind, I made this and posted it on my website with a link back to you!
http://pumpedupchick.com/welcome/fit-in-the-kitchen-green-chili-hummus
Hi Allie! I don’t mind at all – that is so great! I will have to pop over and take a look.
Happy Cooking!