Beef Dip

If you can open a jar and have 10 minutes you can be serving this dip 10 minutes from now.

It has delicious taste with a great mouth-feel, with contrasting textures and flavours.

The layers are largely just jars of what you have home-canned on your shelves.

The layers aren’t cast in stone; they are more just ideas to inspire you. Substitute based on what you have to hand. The already-cooked ground beef gives it a real morish flavour.

This recipe also highlights an advantage to home canning: that you can create smaller-size jars of ingredients in just the right standard quantities for recipes, instead of opening huge store-bought jars or tins that create leftover bits of ingredients to linger and go to waste in the fridge.

You can make this up to a day ahead; store covered in fridge.

(To be clear, this is a “cooking with canning you have already done” recipe. This is not a recipe for canning.)

This recipe uses:

Home-canned kidney beans

Home-canned ground beef

Home-canned pickled jalapenos

Home-canned peach salsa

The recipe

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Beef Dip

Prep time:  10 mins

Total time:  10 mins

Yield: 2½ cups / 550 g

Serving size: 2 tbsp / 50 g

Calories: 78

Fat: 2.4 g

Makes 10 servings of 2 tbsp / 50 g each

Ingredients

• ¼ litre jar home canned kidney beans (1/2 pint jar / 1 cup cooked / 8 oz)
• ½ teaspoon ground cumin
• 1 tablespoon lime juice (fresh or bottled)
• pinch salt sub
• pinch ground black pepper
• ¼ litre jar ground beef (1/2 pint jar / 1 cup cooked / 8 oz)
• 125 ml jar pickled jalapeno (1/4 pint jar / ½ cup / 4 oz)
• ¼ litre jar peach salsa (1/2 pint / 1 cup / 8 oz)
• 4 tablespoons grated low-fat cheese
• Fresh coriander leaves (aka cilantro. Optional)
• Hot sauce (optional)

Instructions

1. Drain kidney beans; rinse. Mash with cumin, salt sub, pepper and lime juice. Spread in bottom of your dip serving dish.
2. Empty ground beef jar water and all into a microwave-safe jug of vessel. Zap for one minute. Drain well. (Tip! Freeze beef stock for soup)
3. Let cool until safe to touch, then scatter the beef over the mashed bean.
4. Drain the jar of jalapenos, sprinkle them over top the beef.
5. Spoon the salsa over the jalapenos.
6. Sprinkle the grated cheese on top of the salsa.
7. Scatter some fresh chopped coriander leaves over top (optional).
8. Drizzle with some hot sauce, depending on the tastes of your crowd (optional).

Notes

The purpose of heating the ground beef briefly is to make it give up all its canning water quickly.

Use whatever salsa you have to hand, obviously.

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Serving idea

To stay with a healthier theme, serve with these homemade nacho chips that are cheaper and healthier than anything you will get from a store!

Per every 3 to 4 people you are serving dip to, take 5 corn tortillas that are roughly about 15 cm (6 inch) wide. (Exact width does not matter). Thaw first if frozen. Using something like a French knife, cut into eighths. Put in a bowl, drizzle with 1 tablespoon of oil per 5 corn tortillas and toss till all are coated.

Cook in an oven or air fryer:

• Oven: spread out on baking sheet, bake at 175 C (350 F) for 4 minutes. Toss, bake for another 4 minutes, toss and bake more if needed. OR
• Basket-type air fryer: these are particularly good cooked in a basket air fryer, such as a Philips AirFryer: air fry at 180 C (350 F) for 7 to 8 minutes, toss frequently.

Watch during final minute or two of cooking as they can go from golden crispy to overcooked in an instant.

Nutrition

Nutritional information is for dip only, not accompanying nachos, etc. Calculated based on extra-lean ground beef, and 4% fat cheese.

Per 2 tablespoons (50 g  / 1.5 oz):

• 78 calories, 61 mg sodium
• Weight Watchers PointsPlus®: 2 tablespoons (50 g  / 1.5 oz) = 2 points

* Nutrition info provided by https://caloriecount.about.com

* PointsPlus™ calculated by healthycanning.com. Not endorsed by Weight Watchers® International, Inc, which is the owner of the PointsPlus® registered trademark.