One of the best things about not being in the office this week was having time to make hummus. I ended up making several batches, each as subtly different as the last.
I kicked off with 200g dried organic chickpeas (from some supermarkets and all wholefood shops). Hard as bullets, I soaked them overnight in water and then cooked them (in the same water) for an hour until soft enough to eat. Of course, you can use tins for speed and this is a fab recipe.
(Mind you, the comments in above website were also instructive. I learnt I could use roasted sesame seeds instead of tahini. I had panicked because no exotic tahini could be found in this English seaside town. Luckily my saviour, Marshford, had a jar or two of the wondrous middle-eastern sesame seed paste.)
Using the hand-held blender, I noisily blended one clove of garlic (use more if no one objects) in the juice of one lemon, water from the cooked chickpeas (2 Tbs – that’s table not teaspoons!), olive oil (2 Tbs) and the yummy, runny, organic sesame seed paste (2 Tbs). I added rock salt to taste (being careful not to oversalt – so easy to do), and a teaspoon each of ground cumin and coriander.
Once all the easy bits were blended, I added the fibrous chickpeas and mashed through them with my trusted electric tool.
I have written about hummus before but it is a food that bears repetition. And experimentation. When I ran out of lemon juice, I used lime and no one noticed.
Served with toast (in my case, spelt from the wondrous Common Loaf), I produced a nutrient-rich and high-fibre protein-filled snack.
The vegetarians and the world’s wise peasants know that combining pulses with grains (and subsituting, if you wish, pulses/grains for seeds) makes a protein equal to that delivered by the dear animals.
Real Food Lover 