Vegetarian Recipe: Hummus

The final recipe from the cooking class I taught on Thursday..."Beyond Beans and Rice: Eating Beans to Save Money and Use Your Food Storage."

Hum-Dinger Hummus
from Big Snacks, Little Meals

SERVES 4

1 15 oz. can garbanzo beans
1 clove of garlic, peeled (I usually do less garlic)
3 Tbsp. tahini (sesame paste available in health food stores or the international aisle of your grocery store)
1 Tbsp. olive oil
salt
1 lemon, halved
water (optional)
paprika (optional)

• Open the can of garbanzo beans. Strain the juice and rinse the beans with fresh water. Put the beans into the blender.
• Add the garlic, tahini, olive oil, and salt to the blender or food processor. Next, squeeze the juice from the lemon into the blender.
• Put the lid on the blender, and blend away! You're going for a smooth mush. If you need to, stop the blender, and use the rubber spatula to push the ingredients off of the sides and into the center.
• If the mixture is too stiff, blend in a little water to thin it out.
• Scrape the hummus with the rubber spatula into a serving dish. You can sprinkle a little paprika on top. It looks cool and tastes great.

I serve this with raw vegetables and pita chips, and yes, we do have it for dinner sometimes. I'd really love to do some of those fancy flavors of hummus you can get at Whole Foods. Anyone have any amazing hummus recipes you'd be willing to send me?

As a side story, I ran out of cheese before the cooking class, so I had to stop at Food Lion on my way there, and as I've mentioned, Food Lion is sorely lacking in the organics, so I got conventional cheddar cheese and Kraft cheese slices.

The next day, there was still a lot of cheese left, so I made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch with the Kraft cheese slices. First Son is super picky, so I make my boys try anything new before putting it on their plates to avoid wasting food and making myself angry. So I had them try the processed cheese, explaining that it is "weird cheese."

At dinner, I made tacos with the leftover bean burgers from the class, and First Son asked, "Do these have the weird cheese on them?"

"No, it's regular cheese," I replied, meaning cheddar cheese.

"Are you sure this isn't weird cheese?" he asked a few minutes later.

"I'm sure. I didn't use any weird cheese on these."

He studied his taco a little longer. "Then why is this cheese orange?!"

Ha, ha. That made me chuckle, and also reminded me of this amazing potato stand in the market in Cambridge, where I spent a semester in college. They sold baked potatoes with cheese, but my roommate and I always joked that it was really cheese with baked potatoes. We also got a kick out of the fact that the cheddar cheese was white.

Why do Americans feel the need to make cheddar orange?