members recipes

I came up with this while making Jamie\'s Fish Pie. I always seem to have trouble zesting lemon, so I just used a vegetable peeler to get the peel, and then I whizzed it in my mini food processor. Figured I may as well add the other stuff too - chili, basil-infused olive oil and some extra basil leaves, spinach, and tomatoes all taste great as a dip, but had to restrain myself from not using it as a dip, seeing as I was halfway through making the pie. However it was too watery and gloopy to be a dip, so I put in the tuna to bulk it up a bit and it worked like a charm. This is also the reason why I put \'washed and dried\' after almost all of the ingredients - you definitely do not want any excess water making this more gloopy. Obviously you could substitute the tuna with another, more environmentally friendly fish cooked to your liking, or as I said above, you could add dahl, chickpeas etc instead to bulk it up.

Ingredients

1 lemon, washed and dried
½-1 fresh red chili pepper, washed and dried (add more if desired)
handful of fresh basil leaves, washed and thoroughly dried
Extra virgin olive oil to taste (basil-infused olive oil is highly recommended, otherwise you could just add another handful of fresh basil leaves)
a good handful of spinach, washed, dried and roughly chopped
a couple of ripe tomatoes, washed, dried, and quartered or 6-8 cherry/grape tomatoes, washed and dried
1x180g can tuna, drained (6 & 1/3 oz) OR
add dry roasted dahl/drained chickpeas from a can until it reaches desired \'dip-like\' texture
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Method
First, zest the lemon, then squeeze out all the juice.
Deseed the chili pepper and chop in to smaller bits if necessary.
Whizz the lemon zest first, then the chili. Make sure all the zest is finely chopped. If not, add a few glugs of olive oil and the lemon juice, then whizz again.
Add tomatoes, basil, and spinach leaves, then whizz again. (If a few big bits of lemon zest remain, chop them up with a pair of kitchen scissors and put them back in).
Add drained tuna (or dahl/chickpeas). Whizz again.
Make sure you can dip something in it without the dip sliding off.
For a real guilt-free snack, serve with finger length, thickly sliced vegetables such as carrot, celery, bell pepper, cucumber etc, as well as steamed broccoli florets or whole beans.
Otherwise, you could still keep it quite healthy by serving with toasted pita bread, mini baked wedges, cocktail shrimp.