NOTchos

I LOVE Nachos! Crunchy chips that are smothered in cheese and toppings, Mmmm! But don't let these NOTchos deceive you! They may look like that cheesy, high calorie, terrible for you snack, but they're NOT! This snack is "nachos" made healthy, smothered in low-fat yogurt and TONS of fresh fruit! These are nachos i'm more than happy to feed my family, and they taste as good as they look!

You Need:

• 3 Mango Spears (extra ripe)
• 1/4 cup water
• Red and Yellow food coloring (optional)
• 1 6oz cup low-fat vanilla yogurt
• 1 Strawberry (firm)
• 6 large Blueberries (firm)
• 1 Kiwi (firm)
• Tortilla chips
• Cooking Spray
• Cinnamon Sugar

Put the super ripe mango and water in a blender and blend until smooth. It should take about 30 seconds. Then pour the puree into a bowl. If you want a super-duper creamy "cheese" sauce you can strain it through a sieve first, but I found this unnecessary. Add 4oz (about 2/3 of the yogurt cup) into the puree and mix until combined.

The mixture now resembles a cheese sauce! However, the color is slightly off. If you care to make this dish extremely deceiving, add a drop of red and yellow food coloring and mix well to get that orange, processed cheese look shown in the last picture.

Red Peppers:

Take the strawberry and cut off the stem. Now cut off the bright red parts. I did this by making 4 thin slices off the sides, leaving the center in a box shape. Take the slices and julienne into strips and dice to make nice even square chunks.

Green Peppers:

Peel the kiwi and cut off the tip and bottom. In the same fashion as the strawberry, cut off the bright green parts by making 4 slices. These slices need to be rather thin to avoid the seeds. After cutting the 4 sections, again julienne/dice the slices. If you have seeds on your slices, carefully scrape off the seeds with a knife and discard them before you cut it into pieces.

Onions:

Take the center portion of the kiwi and cut off 4 more slices and discard them to leave only the center white part of the kiwi. Again, if there are seeds, now is the time to get rid of them. It's almost impossible to remove the seeds once it's cut into pieces. Cut the remaining kiwi into strips and dice it to form little "onion" pieces.

Start with 6 super firm, extra large blueberries. It's important you have nice hard berries to make nice slices. Take one blueberry and cut off the rounded section from the right and left side and discard. Then take the remaining portion and slice it in half to form 2 perfect slices. Repeat with the remaining berries. NOTE: you don't ACTUALLY have to discard ANY of the fruit throughout this entire instructable. You can eat it it, or if you don't care how "perfect" it looks, just throw it on the NOTchos at the end ;)

Now you have all of the "Vegi's"/ fruit prepped! That was easy, right?? Look how colorful and deceptively real they look!!

This is a desert/sweet dish, so the traditional chip needs to be modified to fit that profile. Take the tortilla chips and spread them out on a pan. Try not to overlap them as much as possible. Spray the chips with a decent amount of cooking spray and immediately sprinkle with cinnamon sugar and lightly toss the chips. Mixing the salty chips with sugar sounds kinda silly, but trust me! The sweet/salty combination is a party in your mouth!

NOTE: If you don't have cinnamon sugar, its super easy to make!! Just toss 1/4C of sugar with 1TBS of cinnamon into a bowl and mix!

Pile the sugar chips on a plate and SMOTHER it in the mango-yogurt "cheese" sauce. The more the merrier, right? It's fruit and yogurt for crying out loud!!!! Sprinkle on the fruit "vegi's" and top it with a dab of yogurt, aka "sour cream". What's left? Oh, yes! ENJOY your NOTchos! Guilt free! Bring on swimsuit season!