If you’re looking for seasoned beans, cocktails, and chips and guacamole to bolster your main dish at dinner, we’ve got you covered.
Seasoned prepared beans from BeanVivo Organics
San Diego, California-based BeanVivo Organics makes seasoned organic beans and chickpeas, offering a range of flavors, including coconut curry and three-bean vegan chili. However, we were taken with their black beans and refried pinto beans. These seasoned beans come ready to eat in pouches, making them a quick and easy addition to your summertime tacos, burritos, wraps, nachos and any other dish that can use some protein. They can be the base for a soup, can be part of a grain bowl, or can be mixed in with eggs. We dreamed up dozens of ways to use these flavorful beans, and we loved that there’s a code on the pouch so you can trace the source of the beans to the U.S. fields where they were grown.
$3.99 per 10-ounce pouch. Available on Amazon. Information at beanvivo.com.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Margarita wine cocktail from Rancho La Gloria
There are lots of margaritas and margarita mixes out there, but we’ve been enjoying this ready-to-drink margarita in a sweet, frosted bottle from Rancho La Gloria. The story is that the Rancho La Gloria Hotel in Tijuana, Mexico, is where the margarita first was served, back in 1938. We can’t say this is the same recipe, but it is a very delicious margarita, made with agave wine instead of tequila. (Agave is same source plant for both the wine and the liquor.) The cocktails also include cane sugar, natural flavors and lime juice, and come in the traditional lime flavor, but also strawberry, mango, watermelon, peach, blueberry and paloma. Just uncap the bottle and pour.
$14.99 per 1.5-liter bottle, $8.99 per four-pack of 187-milliliter bottles. Available at Publix, Kroger, Target and Food Depot. Information at rancholagloria.com.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Tortilla chips and guacamole from Alligator Pear Foods
Jay and Emily Dallas of Atlanta-based Alligator Pear started with a food truck in 2013, but, within a few years, they decided to concentrate on their bestsellers, kettle-cooked corn tortilla chips and two varieties of fresh guacamole. The chips are addictive. They come in two flavors, chili lime and sea salt and pepper. Please don’t ask us to pick a favorite. Because they’re kettle-cooked, they stay crisp. We even experimented, leaving the bag open for a few days in humid Atlanta, and they still were crisp! We were hard-pressed to let the chips sit around that long, because they are pretty irresistible. As for the guacamole, it comes in both classic and spicy versions, and it’s so fresh-tasting that you’d swear it was made that morning. Maybe that’s because the Dallases make each batch by hand. It’s not a blended guacamole, so you can see the individual ingredients and happily enjoy every bite.
$9 per 9.5-ounce container of guacamole, $6 per 6-ounce bag of chips. Purchase chips and guacamole at the Saturday morning Peachtree Road, Alpharetta and Marietta farmers markets or Lucy’s Market in Buckhead, the Front Porch Market in Vinings, Kelly’s Market in Decatur and Floral Park Market in Atlanta. Also available at alligatorpearfoods.com, where a four-pack of 6-ounce bags of chips is $24.
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