Side-step The Cookie Pusher & 'Skinny' Dip Into This.

Welcome to samoas (thin mint and tag-a-long) season.  There are cookie pushers around every corner and at the door of every market that seem to always find me at my most vulnerable moments.

Yes Scout, you are cute...and yes, you know how to move cookies...but girl, this year i'm not budging.  I don't care if you are 2 boxes away from making a girl scout world record.  I refuse to let a 3 1/2 foot hussler, that doesn't even know what a 'calorie' is, ruin my best efforts at losing these last 5 lbs.

So, I've signed up for bootcamp.  Talk about out of my work out box.  I do yoga.  I don't take to being yelled at well.  Yet, i happily joined Core Power for 2 weeks of double workouts daily: One crazy 1 hour circuit training class with coaches with whistles at the crack of dawn (cock-a-doodle-doo), and one workout later in the day on my own.  I'm 3 days deep and the body is already feeling fatigued.  I'm so out of my comfort zone....but it's soooo what my body needs.  Plus (go figure) its really quite fun!

Because of my determination to be aggressive with my routine these next 2 weeks, my place looks like a bachelor pad.  In the effort to get back into my skinny jeans (my mantra throughout bootcamp) I've hung images of Victorias Secret models all over the kitchen.  Clearly the boyfriend likes the home improvements i'm making.  Having a skinny bitch on the fridge and in the pantry should make me think twice before forging into the crackers, cookies, cheeses, or whatever lies in this hungry girls war path.

But enough about me.  You must be wondering where your recipe is....

Here is another Hara Mara All Star.  It's a simple dip they'd put on the table for us daily to eat with either baked tortilla chips or jicama sticks, carrots, and cukes.  I've adjusted the recipe a bit to make it a little more of a 'skinny' dip.  Chef Hugo gave me the recipe as follows (he used beet for the sample he demoed with us, as pictured above):

Steam about a cup of any vegetable you would like to use (beet, cauliflower, carrot, sweet potato)
Once they are steamed to the point that they are very soft put them into a high speed blender (make sure they are still hot, this is crucial to getting smooth consistency)
Add the juice of 1/2 to 1 lime
1 clove of garlic
and about 1/2 to 1 cup of avocado oil
add salt and pepper to taste and blend

He mentioned that if you make it with sweet potato to try adding a little nutmeg and orange.

He also said this makes a great vegan sauce to top any dish.  Just simply add a little veggie stock to thin it down.

Wanting to re-create my hara mara dining experience again, I went to buy avocado oil and was blown away at the cost.  It's especially a punch in the stomach considering the amount of oil the recipe uses.  Plus....that much avo oil is just straight fattening (2 tbsps of avocado oil has almost 30 g fat while one whole avocado has that amount.  The recipe calls for 1 cup avo oil.  There are 16 tbsp in a cup, you do the math).  So i turned on my ingenuity engine and bought myself a big ol' ripe (soft) avocado and decided to try to make it without the oil, but using the real fruit instead.  It turned out GREAT!  Whipped and delicious and lower in fat than the hara mara original recipe, it didn't last but a few moments before the boy and I devoured all of it's goodness.  The image i took below was made with a yellow beet rather than red and the avocado rather than the oil, so the color turned out to be a yellow green, however i bet if you used a red beet you'd get a darker pink/red end product.