Recipe Cannellini beans with roast garlic and rosemary dip
This New Year we decide to serve up a trio of Italian-inspired antipasti dip starters. Here we give you the recipe for one of them – cannellini beans with roast garlic and rosemary. This dip is ever so easy to make and tastes divine. It is perfect for adding to your work lunch box, to have as a mid-morning or mid-afternoon snack, to keep yourself away from the chocolate and cakes.
Beans are excellent for giving you sustainable energy for hours after eating (meaning you are less likely to want to snack on sweet things!) and are great for helping your body to detox, due to their antioxidant properties. Garlic also helps with your cleanse. Roasting the garlic brings a softness and sweetness to this dip. To save yourself time, roast some garlic next time you have the oven on, as it is easy enough to prepare a day or two in advance, and store in the fridge. You can use raw garlic instead (or sautéed), but reduce the number of cloves to one or two, otherwise raw garlic has a tendency to feel like it is burning in your throat! You can also swap the cannellini beans for other cooked beans. Rosemary is a delightful fragrant herb that grows well in gardens in Spain (and Europe), so is usually widely available in farmers markets, shops or supermarkets. It is a source of calcium and iron, plus antioxidants which support your cleanse. Some of the health benefits of rosemary include improving mood, reducing inflammation in the body and boosting your memory.
Recipe: Cannellini beans with roast garlic and rosemary dip
This recipe serves: 6.
Ingredients
4 large garlic cloves, skin on
400g cooked white cannellini beans, washed and drained
Large handful of rosemary, finely chopped
Juice from ½ lemon
½ tbsp apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp oil
Method
Roast the garlic whole, in the skin until it becomes soft and squishy – it might take 30-40 minutes in a medium oven. Squeeze out the garlic and discard the skins. Place the garlic in a bowl with the cooked cannellini beans.
Mash the cannellini beans and garlic together using a fork. Stir in the rosemary, lemon, apple cider vinegar and oil. You want the beans to remain a little bit chunky (so do not blend). Add water if the dip is too dry. Keep rustic!
Cover and refrigerate for a few hours to allow the flavours to develop.
Serve with veggie seed crackers, homemade nachos or veggie sticks (as shown here in our photo. We also served up a broccoli and cauliflower dip, plus a cherry tomato and olive topping for our New Years Eve Italian inspired antipasti).
This recipe will keep in the fridge (in a sealed container) for up to three days.
Find more recipes on our blog page and read more about the food here at our retreat by clicking here.
Let us know how you get on!
About the author
- Lisa is one of the founders of La Crisalida Retreats. She is an Epidemiologist, therapeutic hatha and yin yoga teacher and also teaches mindfulness meditation. Lisa has studied NLP and hypnosis, as well as nutrition (she designs the menus).
