Pick up any New Orleans tourism guide, and a must culinary treat is a muffuletta.

How can you not love the olives, salami, and yes, the bread? So tasty, so yummy and so Louisiana. By now, you all have realized my love for my home state food, and how I am looking for any way to ‘skinny’ Louisiana cooking.

Looking at a traditional muffuletta, we have a dish that presents two issues. It is high in sodium and in carbs. After careful thought and review of ingredients, I realized we can easily ‘skinny’ and enjoy this dish with simple substitutions.

Muffuletta ingredients we can easily skinny:

• Salami – high in sodium.
• Bread – high in carbs.
• Olives – high in sodium.

We can easily skinny this dish by:

• Cutting the amount of salami in half and adding low-sodium ham.
• Eliminate bread.
• Use low sodium olives.

I didn’t want to go the route of wrapping the muffuletta ingredients in lettuce, so I decided to transform the dish into a dip. Using light cream cheese AND mozzarella cheese, we turned the traditional muffuletta into a delicious hot dip! Serve with high fiber crackers (I used the Kashi Pita Crisp), we have an amazing warm, creamy dish worthy of Mardi Gras and tailgating celebrations.

I served this as a date night in – and yes, it was AMAZING!

Skinny Hot Muffuletta Dip

Ingredients:

1 package (8 ounce) of light cream cheese

4 slices of salami, diced

1 jar (6 ounce) of low-sodium green olives, drained

I small can of black olives, sliced

3/4 cup roasted red peppers, drained and chopped

1/2 cup giardiniera (pickled peppers), drained and chopped

1/4 cup provolone cheese, chopped

1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine all ingredients in a 9-inch casserole dish
Bake for 25 minutes or until bubbling.
Serve with high-fiber (5-grams of fiber or higher) crackers.