[Photograph: Sasha Marx]
Even if we aren’t internet hosting in-person dinner or cocktail events lately, we are able to nonetheless make tasty, pantry-friendly dips and appetizers for snacking on throughout quarantine. If you are self-isolating with a number of dried legumes in your pantry, then this super-smooth white bean dip is one other nice approach to put a pot of beans to good use.
For this dip, we hold issues easy by buzzing up cooked white beans with a little bit little bit of their cooking liquid, garlic, and lemon juice, earlier than streaming in a wholesome quantity of extra-virgin olive oil to type a {smooth} purée. To mood the tough chunk of uncooked garlic, we steep a grated clove in lemon juice earlier than processing it with the beans. As we discovered with our tahini sauce with garlic and lemon, combining lemon juice with processed uncooked garlic prevents harsher garlic flavors from forming, permitting the garlic to lend a extra delicate aroma to the dip quite than a pungent chunk that will overwhelm the flavour of the beans.
The dip is paired with a vivid and assertive puttanesca-inspired roasted cherry tomato salad that performs off the earthy richness of the beans. Cherry tomatoes are roasted with a little bit olive oil till their skins simply start to wrinkle and cut up, after which are tossed with briny black olives, anchovy, recent parsley, and a wholesome pinch of crimson pepper flakes. The juices and drippings from the roasted tomatoes type a candy and tangy dressing with out the necessity for extra oil or vinegar.
Both the bean dip and the roasted tomato salad will hold for a couple of days within the fridge, so you’ll be able to dole it out at your leisure as a wholesome snack, gentle desk lunch, or Zoom completely satisfied hour appetizer. And hopefully some day quickly we’ll be capable to return to being stressed about internet hosting cocktail events once more, and we are able to make this recipe in between journeys to the bodega to choose up extra ice and chips.
