Clean Eating Fondue

Looking for a fun and yummy way to celebrate New Year’s Eve with the family? Fondue is an easy and delicious way to share a meal. My husband and I love fondue. Like, really love it. We have a couple of fondue pots and we use them often. I honestly never thought about how healthy it really is until we started My Clean Kitchen. Even the dessert isn’t so bad, as long as you do it right! The cheese course, well, that should probably be skipped or at least not done often. But if you serve it with the right stuff it can also be a not-so-bad for you course to a meal. For this recipe though, I’m going to include both the main course and the delicious chocolate, both clean recipes.

I’ll start with the main course. Its simply broth, and some fresh herbs, maybe a splash of white wine, if you prefer and have it on hand. We usually use chicken broth, but you could easily make this a vegetarian meal with vegetable stock. You could add some Caribbean flare with a splash of orange juice and/or lime juice and maybe some fresh cilantro. Just adding some fresh chopped herbs is going to give your broth a great flavor. We always start by crushing a garlic clove and rubbing it around the fondue pot before adding the broth. It really infuses that garlic flavor. Add some minced garlic, fresh chopped rosemary, sage, or thyme (or all three). Let it heat in the fondue pot until it just starts to simmer so the flavors meld, then you’re ready to go.

For the protein – we usually cut up a couple of organic chicken breasts, a steak filet, and sometimes a pork tenderloin. But, you could do shrimp, lobster, duck, or sirloin. For the veggies – we do broccoli, mushroom caps, carrots, and sometimes red skin potatoes. Although, we have phased out white potatoes in our diet this year, so we’ll be skipping those.

The chocolate fondue is as simple as melting some chocolate. We use our sterno (non-electric) fondue pot for the chocolate. It mimics a double boiler. The chocolate can be done in either. If you don’t have two fondue pots or don’t want to clean the one you use for the main course, simply melt the chocolate in a double boiler on the stove and keep it warm until just before bringing it to the table to transfer to the fondue pot. The chocolate recipe is simply dark chocolate nibs or chips and a smidge of coconut oil. You could add a dollop of almond butter too for an awesome flavor. For dipping, strawberries, banana slices, apple slices, grapes, or any thing else you want to cover in chocolate. If you are feeling adventurous you could make our clean eating brownies to serve as a dipper.

Click here for the Chocolate Recipe.

 Local Ingredient: Broccoli purchased from Relay Food in my local produce box.