A good sauce can make or break a dish. Just like a good dip can take your crudites from bland to grand. Sauces and dips add moisture, texture, and flavor. They add variety to our weeknight staples and add interest to flavors we know and love.
Unfortunately, lots of the sauces and dips we purchase have unwanted sugar, sodium, preservatives, and other unwanted ingredients. While convenient, they often are not in line with the nutritional goals we have set. Our most basic label reading skills kick into action and confirm what we already know; homemade is better.
Luckily, dips and sauces are usually quite easy to make. This is good news for everyone but great news for those of us with ingredient issues. Homemade items allow us to avoid any of the things that tend to lurk in the ingredients list. For me, that list is long, and I've found that certain ingredients like wheat and dairy are often found in so many store-bought items that they can be difficult to avoid. Making our own also allows us to get creative and use ingredients we may even have around as kitchen staples. We can use traditional spices and flavors but also make new ones to enhance our culinary experience and make them all our own.
Another advantage to making our own dips and sauces is that we can rely on recipes a plenty to get us started. Recipes can be tweaked to include ingredients and tastes we prefer but can give us a loose guideline to follow for basic ingredients. I love getting inspired by the work and ideas of others! I started out making homemade dips and sauces this way and have gotten a bit more brave as I ventured on.
I find so many recipes through Pinterest and discover new websites and blogs there often. A few websites that I really like are The Simple Veganista, Chocolate Covered Katie, Detoxinista. They all have fantastic recipes and inspire me to make my own. I recently made a new version of a recipe that I had tried before. It was originally a hit, but I was looking to make it a bit different; I dove into the world of Pinterest and found a new website and a different version of the idea I needed. I wanted to make an avocado crema, and Turning Back the Clock had just the recipe I wanted to tweak! So, I tweaked the basic ingredients, added my own, and a very tasty Avocado Cilantro Lime Crema was born and made my shrimp tacos something to be remembered!
Here's my recipe:
2 Medium Haas Avocados
6 oz. Fage 0% Greek Yogurt
2 Tsp. Minced Garlic
1/4 Tsp. Sea Salt
Juice from 1 lime
Juice from 1/2 lemon
Fresh Cilantro to taste
Cumin to taste
Cayenne to taste
Onion Powder to taste
Black Pepper to taste
I'll leave you with a video of how I made it so that you can try it, and tweak it if you choose to do so, as well. This crema is somewhere between a dip and a sauce and can easily serve as both. It has everything I want and nothing that I didn't. Let me know if you try any new dips or sauces on your own, and maybe my next inspiration will come from you!
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