2For66

Confession time: I’ve done a lousy job of keeping my blog up since February. As of this writing I have two book reports and three or four recipes to blog. I’ve lost some free time because I went back to my old work place on a part time limited duration basis to help with a large system implementation. We also went to Chicago for a couple of weeks to visit our son, daughter-in-law and 21-month old grandson. Over my 15 months of retirement I  lost track on how to manage my time.

At any rate, In mid February I posted a  recipe for hummus we’ve used for ever. It uses canned chick peas (aka garbanzo beans). Shannon, one of my old college friends (wait she’s not old – our friendship is old) commented that  cooking your own chick peas will transform this dish. Challenge accepted.

I got a little cross-wise with making this. I usually will compare two or three recipes and often combine them in some way. For this recipe I went with a couple of my stand-by sources: Dad Cooks Dinner and Serious Eats. Serious Eats promised an extra smooth hummus gained by removing the skins after cooking the beans/peas. Smooth? I like smooth. So off I went with two recipes in front of me. Hmmm, Serious Eats doesn’t pressure cook the peas, I’ll use Mike Vrobel’s pressure cooking technique. Hmmm, should I soak them first or not? One recipe calls for it and one doesn’t. So, I soaked them overnight as Serious Eats called for but cooked them according to Dad Cooks Dinner. No worries. Wait a minute the amount of chick peas is different in the two recipes. I cooked a full pound of chick peas when that was WAY more than I needed.

To reiterate – that is WAY more peas than I needed – I just upped the amounts of the other ingredients to get back in balance.

Chick peas, olive oil, a bit of the cooking broth, garlic, lemon juice, and tahini paste – ands  kosher salt (not pictured).

I tried to remove the skins from the chick peas after cooking (as called for in Serious Eats) but it was just too difficult; having been soaked and pressure cooked they were very mushy and removing the skins was almost impossible. I did get the skins off about a quarter of the peas before stopping.

Grab the food processor (not while it’s running please) – and thoroughly mince the garlic; then add the chickpeas and pulse; then add everything but the olive oil and pulse until it gets creamy. Finally with the food processor running drizzle in the olive oil through the feed tube.

I think it’s best served in a shallow bowl – like a pasta bowl – sprinkled with some paprika and an extra drizzle of olive oil.

Despite pulling together two recipes without adjusting the ingredients first this is a huge win. As Shannon promised, it is much, much better than using canned chickpeas. And it was super creamy despite not removing all those chickpea skins. My only addition next time would be a bit of cumin – which we normally add.

I’ll make this again and keep better track of what I’m doing – in the meantime, I suggest you drop by Mike Vrobel’s Dad Cooks Dinner site and use his recipe.

Serious Eats has a recipe for Israeli-style hummus featuring puréeing the garlic with the lemon juice to smooth the garlic flavor.  Instead of removing the chickpea skins, he uses a blender to get a nice smooth consistency. When I try it I’ll report back.