Hummus

It's a stormy Sunday afternoon, D was playing World of Warcraft and I was bored. I still had to iron and make lunch for work the next day, but I was procrastinating. I was irritably poking through cupboards when I came across a can of chickpeas.

Lately I've been on a real pita kick. I fell in love with the souvlaki style deli chicken by Bite Me Fine Foods and was eating that in pita breads with salad and then I was planning all sorts of things I could stuff into their little pockets (how good does Ikea meatballs in a pita sound?). I've been reading some suggestions about pita fillings and many recommended using hummus as a healthier alternative to mayonnaise. I have never really been a hummus person until we visited D's parents in Sydney and they made the most amazing hummus. I really enjoyed it but never really tried to recreate it. Then we had it as part of a trio of dips as an entree and I started thinking about giving it another try. I bought some prepared hummus from the supermarket and it turned out to be absolutely fantastic (Mum's Choice, if you're wondering) and after that I decided I should try it myself.

Nearly 2 years from my first taste of yummy hummus, I pulled the chickpeas out of the cupboard and decided to make some hummus to relieve my boredom.

I have to say that I didn't really measure when I made this. I went entirely by taste and things got even more confusing when my little food processor refused to mix the whole thing and I had to start pulsing in two batches.

I started with a can of drain and rinsed chickpeas, half a red onion, a small clove of garlic, 1/4 cup tahini, 1/4 cup olive oil, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 1/2 teaspoon curry powder (I ran out of cumin), 1/2 teaspoon of paprika and some kosher salt. This resulted in a quite bitter tasty, pasty and dry mix. I think it was too much tahini. I added more oil, lemon juice and curry powder and tried again. It needed salt. Added more salt, tried again... and so on. I found that I really liked it with a lot of lemon juice. The lemon really lifts the flavour of the hummus.

It's very moreish. The corn chip in the picture below was a hastily grabbed prop to show the consistency, but once I ate it I had to have some more. It's a good sign. It was quite easy too, my biggest issues were not using my big processor and running out of cumin, olive oil and lemons. It's nearly time to go grocery shopping.


Thanks to a huge backlog of posts, the posting of this recipe has been a little delayed. It was originally made in January 2010.