Hi, I’m Liz, and I’m on a health and fitness journey. I wanted to share the recipes I’ve been making in my kitchen while on this journey. All my recipes are Whole Food Plant Based (WFPB) and made without oil or refined sugar or salt. (I do use miso paste but that can easily be omitted from all my recipes.)
If you want to know when I post a new recipe please hit “subscribe” so we can be friends! This would mean a lot to me and my new channel 🙂
You can also find me on Instagram at @fitlizkitchen where I post what I eat daily, progress pics, and more and you can find free recipes and more (new recipes every week!) at https://fitlizkitchen.com/
I hope you love these recipes!
Low Fat Edamame “Guacamole”
2 cups thawed shelled edamame
1/3 cup lime juice, fresh preferred, bottled is fine though
1 1/2 teaspoons granulated onion
2 teaspoons granulated garlic
2 teaspoons white or yellow miso paste, to taste, see note below
1 teaspoon dried cilantro or dried parsley, if using fresh use 1 tablespoon chopped herbs
1/3 cup filtered water, more or less as needed to blend
OPTIONAL ADD-INS:
Finely chopped onion, I used red onion but white onion or green onion also work
Seeded diced tomatoes or quartered cherry tomatoes or grape tomatoes
Chopped jalapeños, seeded if you wish
Chopped fresh cilantro or parsley
Plant-Based Nacho “Cheese” Sauce
16 ounces silken tofu
2-3 Tablespoons lemon juice
4 ounces fire roasted green chilies
1-4 shakes Cholula Hot Sauce, to taste
2 teaspoons white or yellow miso paste or you can use salt to taste
½ cup nutritional yeast
2 teaspoons granulated garlic
1½ teaspoons granulated onion
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
½ teaspoon dried thyme
¼ teaspoon ground mustard powder
¼ – ½ teaspoon fresh cracked black pepper, to taste
Black Bean Taco Crumbles
15 ounce can no-salt-added black beans, drained and rinsed (or use 1.5 cups cooked black beans)
16 ounces baby bella or white button mushrooms, chopped
2 teaspoons ground cumin, you can replace these spices with store bought taco seasonings if you like
2 teaspoons chili powder
½ teaspoon smoked paprika
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon granulated garlic
1-2 teaspoon dulse flakes, or salt to taste
Bell Pepper Nachos
24 Mini Bell Peppers, or however many needed
1 batch Black Bean Taco Crumbles
½ cup or more Pico de Gallo, store bought or homemade
½ cup or more Vegan Nacho Cheese Sauce
½ cup or more Edamame Guacamole
Other Toppings, Optional, such as chopped white or green onion, sliced black olives, cilantro, etc.
Methods are in the video, but for the printable recipes, ingredient substitutions, tips, and more, check out my full blog posts:
Edamame Guacamole: https://fitlizkitchen.com/edamame-guacamole/
Plant-Based Nacho Cheese Sauce: https://fitlizkitchen.com/plant-based-nacho-cheese-sauce/
Bell Pepper Nachos and Black Bean Taco Crumbles: https://fitlizkitchen.com/healthy-bell-pepper-nachos/
Articles Mentioned in this Video
What About the Sodium in Miso?
https://nutritionfacts.org/blog/what-about-the-sodium-in-miso/
Hi, I’m Liz, and this is Fit Liz Kitchen where it’s Liz—that’s me— getting fit—well, trying anyway— in the kitchen. So if you’re new here, I’m Liz, and I make recipe videos and I eat a whole food, plant-based, no oil, salt or added sugar diet.
And this is just the way I eat for longevity and health, but also for weight loss. So I am working on losing weight. As of the time of filming this video, I have lost 118 pounds. Yeah, I lost only 1 pound since the last video I filmed,
But that’s because I’m filming them back to back. So yesterday I was 117 and today I’m 118… down— 117 pounds down, and today I am 118 pounds down. So anyway, long story short, that’s how I eat to lose weight. And this is one of my new favorite weight loss meals.
I have to share it with you because it’s so delicious and exciting and colorful. This is, if you can’t tell, this is a plate of bell pepper nachos. Yes, I am using halved mini bell peppers as the tortilla chips. Definitely not the same as tortilla chips, but they are crunchy,
They have some sweetness, and they are good for you, packed with nutrients and delicious and low in calories. And then I have topped them with black bean mushroom taco crumbles (which I’ll show you how to make), edamame guacamole (which I will show you how to make). It’s not same as avocado guacamole,
But it does taste really good and it’s much lower in fat. It has lots of nutrients in there, too. And protein! Pico de gallo, which I will not show you how to make because this is store bought and I have a nacho cheese sauce,
Which I will show you how to make because it is low fat and delicious. So yeah, this recipe uses a lot of beans. we’ve got black beans, we’ve got edamame, we’ve got silken tofu which is also soybeans. But that’s because I eat a lot of beans and whole grains and potatoes,
Starchy vegetables, as my sustenance, as well as large quantities of lower calorie non-starchy, vegetables, leafy greens and fruits. And I eat a very limited amount of dietary fat. And that is a long way of saying, I can’t wait to get into this recipe with you.
And first, I just have to say thank you for being here. Thank you for watching my video. Please “like” the video if you like it— give it a like if you liked it. And please leave me a comment— please be nice—if you have anything you want to say about the recipe,
Any questions, any requests for future videos or recipes… And also, if you’re new here, please hit the “subscribe” button and join us. So I post a new recipe or any other kind of video. Like a “what I in the day” video every week.
And I post also new recipes to my website, which is in the description box below. And so I will just get into this recipe and yeah, I hope you like it. Alright. So now we’re going to make the black bean taco… We’ll call them crumbles.
??? (awkward) they do end up kind of like crumbles if you cook them for 10 to 15 minutes. But if you don’t care, then you can just add the mixture. The consistency will be kind of like refried black beans, which would also be delicious, which also you could just use refried beans.
They have oil-free varieties at the grocery store. I’ve seen them. I don’t think they’re low sodium, though. So it depends on what you want. I like this because it has a ton of mushrooms and this is a great recipe if you are okay with the flavor of mushrooms sometimes,
Which they’re kind of hidden in this anyway, it’s not a real strong mushroom flavor, but you don’t like the texture, so this is a great way to sneak them in. Or for people who don’t like veggies. So that was a lot of mushrooms that’s like a pound of mushrooms.
You don’t have to do that many mushrooms. That’s just what I like to do. I like to do a lot of mushrooms and I have a can of no-salt-added black beans here, which I’ve drained and rinsed, and I’m going to pulse these. You can blitz them up totally fine, or you can just
Pulse them until they’re crumbly. Some kind of texture. If you don’t want everything to get too pulsed up you can stop and stir everything around. Make sure those bigger mushrooms get close to the bottom. I suppose if I wanted this to be really chunky, what I could have done is just dice
The mushrooms and you even have to have a food processor to do this. You could just mash up the beans with a fork, kind of like in my chickpea tuna salad, which is in the most recent What I Eat in a Day video that I published,
Which as of now is the only one. You could do black beans, you could mash the black beans, and then you could just finely dice the mushrooms and stir it all together. And that would also work. Well, that’s what I’m going to stop it at. We still have some chunkiness,
But remember that it’s going to cook down, too. I’m going to remove the blade carefully and I’ll show you what I’ve got going on here. I’ve got this looking mixture. Most of it’s finely chopped. You can still see a few chunks of mushrooms that are going to shrink down.
So this is a very wet mixture right now. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to put this into a pan and I’m going to cook it on a skillet over medium heat for 10 to 15 minutes.
I’m going to sprinkle all these spices on there, which you can find the full recipe in the description below. But basically I have my own homemade taco seasoning. You can use a store bought taco seasoning. I don’t because they always have salt and sometimes sugar. So this one this has garlic powder, oregano,
Smoked paprika, cumin, and chili powder. And then for the saltiness factor, I have dulse flakes here. You could also add miso paste, but I didn’t want to add more moisture. And the dulse flakes turned out really, really good. And I promise it doesn’t taste like seafood or seaweed. They’re very neutral in this.
They just add a little bit of that salty kick. This is my favorite skillet of all time. This is an All-Clad nonstick skillet. Unlike cheaper brands, the nonstick used in All-Clad is safe and I have had this skillet for like five years and I love it. So now my skillet is preheated.
So I’m just going to add this mixture and kind of spread it out. So I’m going to babysit this while I do other things. Just stirring it occasionally to make sure that nothing burns and everything dries out evenly. You’re basically just drying out the mixture. And then when it’s thoroughly dried out,
We just kind of crumble it with our cooking spatula. If you didn’t want to babysit it, you could just spread it out on a baking sheet and pop it in the oven and dry it out that way. Spatula here, that’s meant for this. Spread it out.
And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to take all of those spices that I mentioned and I’m going to pop them onto the top of the bean mixture. Bean and mushroom mixture. And I’m going to take this spatula again and I’m just going to stir everything around.
And I suppose I could have mixed this in in the food processor, but I wanted to be sure that it gets really evenly distributed. And since I was pulsing, I wasn’t sure if it was going to get super evenly distributed. You can see the texture is very much like refried beans right now,
Which would be okay if you wanted to stop here or if you wanted to heat this for a few minutes, just until it heated up, and then scoop it onto your nachos. That would be totally cool. That’s pretty good. I’m going to let that sit for a few minutes and
Stir it just every few minutes and make sure nothing’s burning. So first we’re going to make the edamame guacamole because it needs to chill. I really like it cold. I have thawed edamame. Thawed shelled edamame here and I’m going to dump this in my blender. Now I have some lime juice
And this is to taste. Do as much or as little as you like, depending on how acidic you want it. Then I’m going to do some water. I going to do about half the water I need first, just so I don’t overdo the water. I have a little bit of miso paste here.
This is to add the saltiness. If you don’t want to do miso paste and you eat salt, you could totally just do salt. I have a reason. I will put the link in the description box below about why I eat miso instead of salt. And here I have some spices.
I have granulated onion, granulated garlic, and parsley. You could also do cilantro, but my partner does not like cilantro. So I’m doing parsley and then I’ll put cilantro on my plate. Cause I like it. Okay, that’s. That’s actually all we need. I’m going to blend it. And you can blend it a lot
If you like it really creamy, like a sauce. And you might need more water if you want to do that. But if you want it chunky, you can just kind of blend it until it’s the desired texture. I kind of like it mostly blended, but with a few small chunks still in there.
Unlike my hummus, which I like really smooth, unless it’s the spinach artichoke hummus, in which case I like that chunky. Who knows. So I got my tamper here. This will help me blend it up. If you don’t have a tamper, just stop and scrape down your blender every few 20 seconds
Or I don’t know, every so often. I’m going to take a look at this and see if it’s where I like it. So I don’t know if you can see this, but it’s kind of a very thick paste now. It’s a very slight bit chunky, but it’s mostly blended.
You don’t see any whole edamame still in there. I’m going to give this a try. So delicious. You can really taste the lime, you can taste the garlic and the onion, but they’re not too strong. And the edamame just has a nice neutral flavor. It does taste rich like guacamole.
It’s obviously not as creamy, it’s not as fatty. And that’s just the nature of guacamole. This is different, but I really like it. So I’m going to transfer this into a bowl. I’m going to scrape all this out with my handy dandy blender spatula.
If it’s one small tool that’s made a big difference in my kitchen, it’s, you know, really inexpensive, too. Just makes it really easy to scrape out the blender. It’s still a task I don’t really like, but I do want to get all the deliciousness out of there.
This bowl may actually be too big, but that’s okay. I did not want the add-ins to get blended up during the blending process, so I’m going to mix them in now. I have a very small chopped red onion. You could use white onion or green onion, whatever you like, or skip it
If you don’t like that, just use what you like. If I were not sharing this, I would stir in some chopped cilantro, but I am sharing it and now I have some chopped tomatoes that I’m going to add. I did cut out the part that’s super liquidy in the tomato so it didn’t
Make my edamame guacamole too wet, if that makes sense. Watery. So I’m going to start this and now it’s a big enough bowl. Now it’s the right size—in fact, maybe too small, but I will slowly stir this in. So you can even do more tomato here if you want it
Super chunky and more onion. I like it like this. I think this is perfect for my purposes. This would be great if you wanted to make your own tortilla chips by just like cutting up corn tortillas and baking them or air frying them.
I like to squeeze a little bit of lime on them before I do that. I’m not doing that today because we have bell pepper nachos to put them on. But this is all also really good with like raw veggie sticks. You could—also we really like to eat fries and guacamole, so we make
Air fryer—like oil free potato fries— and then we dunk them in. That’s that’s really good. It’s really filling because potatoes are filling and edamame is filling. Alright so there we go. I have my nice big bowl of edamame guacamole. If you wanted, you could add some black pepper.
You could add, like I said, you could add cilantro, you could add parsley if you don’t like cilantro. I’m just going to leave this as is. There’s already dried parsley in the recipe. And I kind of like this just as it is.
So I’m really excited to eat this and I’m going to refrigerate it for later. So let’s make the nacho cheese sauce now. My blender here. I have a block of silken tofu. I’m going to put this into the blender. This is a 16 ounce block, but if you only have
The silken tofu that comes in the little aseptic containers, you just might need two of them. If you didn’t want to do silken tofu, you could do white beans, which would also be low fat or potatoes, boiled potatoes, and if you are okay with a little bit of dietary fat,
Then you could do raw cashews, raw sunflower seeds. You could do a combination of those things, that would be good. Here I have just one of those small cans of fire roasted green chilies. These do have sodium in them. So I try not to use this too often,
And I’m not really eating the entire batch of nacho cheese sauce. I’m splitting it into at least eight portions. So I’m not getting that much of the sodium. But if I wanted to totally avoid it and if you wanted to, you can fire roast your own.
You can roast your own green chilies in the oven. You could do red chilies. You could just add in some cayenne pepper or more hot sauce, which is what I’m doing now. I’m going to add a little bit of miso paste. That is for saltiness.
And again, the reason for what I eat miso paste instead of salt will be in the description box below. I have a little bit of lemon juice, but any kind of vinegar you have should also work except maybe balsamic—I’m not sure that flavor profile would work here.
I think I’m going to stir this. So now I have some nutritional yeast which gives it a cheesy flavor. I have a bunch of spices here again. I have granulated onion, granulated garlic, mustard powder, turmeric, black pepper, thyme, and smoked paprika. The turmeric is purely for color, so,
And it has anti-inflammatory properties, but I don’t think it adds much flavor here. So if you don’t like that, then you can leave it out. So I’m going to blend this— oh, I almost forgot the most important part in a nacho cheese sauce, something spicy. This is not that spicy.
Cholula— You know, I have friends who are like Cholula’s not spicy. But I like Cholula and My stomach can’t really handle super spicy stuff. My partner’s better about it than I am, but. And this definitely has sodium. One teaspoon has 110 milligrams, but not using a whole teaspoon.
And like I said, I’m not eating this entire batch. I’m eating like an eighth of it. And again, if you didn’t want to add any oops. If you didn’t want to add any added sodium, then you could just add cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes or whatever spicy stuff you like to add.
Blend this until it’s super smooth. I have to stop halfway through and scrape the sides once in a while. If I’m using a lot of spices they’ll sometimes get stuck on the side. And I want all that spice stuff mixed in. Delicious. Now’s a good opportunity to taste it. That is so good.
It tastes like nacho cheese sauce. My God, that’s so good. It’s going to be delicious. Alright. You know, I have our nacho cheese sauce. This looks delightful. It’s a nice, thick cheese sauce. If you needed to thin it out, you could. If it’s not thick enough, you could add some nutritional yeast
Or potato flakes to thicken it up. That’s going to cook for a little bit longer. Let’s see here I have at least 6 minutes left on the timer. Plus sometimes it’s 10 to 15 minutes all depending on how much moisture is in there. So I will be back.
I’m going to chop up the bell peppers so that they’re ready to make delicious nachos. And I’ll see you soon. Alright. So here is the mixture as you can see, it has pulled away from the bottom of the pot. And I can—not with an oven mitt.
I can break it up into little pieces. And if you wanted this to be really crispy and crumbly, you could even just let them dry out in the pan if you made this ahead of time. I kind of like them like this
Because they make the rest of the plate kind of warm because otherwise everything’s pretty raw and I would like some warm food tonight. So yeah. So I’m just going to put this in a bowl and then I can start building the nachos. So I’ve got my black bean nacho
Taco crumbles black bean taco crumbles there. It’s kind of hard to say. So let me get a spoon. If these were cool, you could kind of crumble them up by hand, but they are not. But yeah, if you want to make this in advance, you totally can.
You can make all of these elements in advance and then literally just chop up the bell peppers and serve nachos. And you can do this with regular bell peppers. You could do a veggie sticks. what I really love doing it with is air fried potato wedges or circles or
Baked sweet potato like the circles. Those are all really great nachos. Or you can make your own chips, like I said before, with with corn tortillas. Just cut them up put a little lime juice on them and bake them or air fry them. So yeah. Anyway,
I’m going to start building these What I like to do is put the taco crumble on first. I’m not really concerned if some just gets on the plate because then you can just eat all the little bits on the plate afterward. Like when you eat a taco and all the stuff falls out
And then you have like a taco bowl with all the stuff on it. That’s fun. The funny thing about this recipe is that because black beans are so dark, this kind of looks like dirt, but I assure you it is delicious. I have another plate of these bell peppers in the background.
That one is for my partner. So that’s why I’m only going to use about half of this mixture. I’m also going to give a heavier hand of this to their plate because they are very tall and can eat more calories than I can and still lose weight. How fair is that?
Which is totally fine. I’m not resentful. I’m proud of them. I think that’s pretty good. I still want to be able to see the nice color of the bell peppers. So. So you can see I just want to try this. God, it’s so good.
It’s not super salty, but we have some saltier things here since the miso, so it’s just kind of perfect. If you want to be fancy, you could use, like, a small cookie scoop. I’ve used a melon baller, but right now I am just so hungry and I want to eat everything.
Like I said, I really don’t care if any just kind of gets on the plate because I’ll just scoop it up and eat it with my spoon afterward. I have some pico. I’m going to eat the majority of this pico because it does have—it’s store bought,
So it does have cilantro in it and my partner does not enjoy that. Now my nachos, my bell peppers, are definitely getting buried under all this stuff. But you know what? That’s what happens with nachos. I think that’s pretty good. A little bit more there. This is definitely not necessary but
I put the cheese in—the nacho cheese sauce—in a squirt bottle because it’s kind of fun to do a zigzag across the top. But you could definitely just pour the cheese sauce mixture on top. So I’m going to give this a really good drizzle and I’m going to go back the other way
A couple of times just to get a lot on there. So here we have our big bell pepper nacho plate, and I really hope you give this recipe a try. It I know there’s a lot of moving parts, but you can make the nacho cheese in advance
And if it thickens too much in the fridge just blend it up with a little bit of nondairy milk (unsweetened) to revive it. You can—if you’re making your pico— you can make that advance. You could just buy it like I did. You can make the edamame guac in advance too,
Which I actually recommend because I like it cold. And then you have the black bean taco crumbles, which you can also totally make in advance. You can heat them back up when you’re ready to eat them. You can bake these in the oven if you don’t want to make them on the stovetop.
And then all you have to do is slice up the—slice the bell peppers in half, the little mini bell peppers, or you could do regular sized bell peppers and just chop them in large chunks, and make your nachos that way. Alright. So all that’s left now is to try it.
So I’m going to pick one of these in front so I can see the corner of. Oh my God, look at that. That is loaded. That is so good. It’s a flavor explosion. It’s very crunchy, very delicious. I can’t wait to devour this plate, so I’m going to go do that.
Anyway, I really hope you give this recipe a try and let me know what you think of it in the comments below. Give this video “like” if you liked it and if you want to see more videos, recipes, and what I eat day and stuff like that, then just hit the “subscribe” button
And I look forward to sharing more videos with you in the future. Bye.