Hummus Revisted

I love hummus! I’ve made it before many, many times, I’ve even shared some recipes here. Today, I was in the mood for some, I’ve been eating a lot of it lately, it’s an easy vegetarian protein – and although I’m not exactly a vegetarian, I’m leaning more that way all the time.  Anyway – the famous name brand hummus is full of GMO soy (and why is there soy in my hummus, anyway?!) and it’s easy enough to make yourself, so I made a couple of batches today. The first was Roasted Sweet Potato and Garlic Hummus and the second, Basil and Roasted Garlic Hummus.  It’s so easy you can’t believe it and the results are so much better when you use ingredients that you picked out, not a bunch of chemicals in a plastic container.  So, here’s what I did.

• 3 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 in. pieces
• 2 heads of garlic, left in tact
• tahini
• 2 large cans of chickpeas drained, rinsed, and separated into two portions
• lemons
• lots of fresh basil leaves
• water
• salt
• olive oil

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Line a baking sheet with foil and spread out the potatoes.  Drizzle olive oil over the potatoes and using your hands, toss well to coat all the pieces.  Take two other, smaller pieces of foil and lay them out flat.  Remove any loose paper from the garlic, but leave the tight paper on. Cut off the bottom of the head of garlic.  Make sure to cut the loose end, the rough part on top is what will hold this all together.  Place each head on a piece of foil, cut side up.  Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, close the foil tightly around the garlic and put on the tray with the potatoes.  Cook for one hour.  Remove and allow to cool.

When the potatoes and garlic have cooled, get out your food processor and put the sweet potatoes and one portion of the chickpeas (one can) into the processor and pulse.

At this point, I realized that pulsing was going to take way too long, so I turned it on and let it go…  I opened up one of the heads of garlic and squeezed about 4 cloves into the mixture, and continued to process – I added two big spoonfuls of tahini, a little lemon juice, a little salt, and a little water, all to taste and sight.  If the hummus looks dry, but tastes good, just add more water and continue to process until it’s smooth.

Transfer to an air tight container and refrigerate.

Rinse out your processor bowl, the blade, the top, and any spatula you used, you don’t want the sweet potato getting into your basil.  Although, that may be a future experiment now that I think about it.

Rip about 30 fresh basil leaves into the processor bowl and squeeze another couple of roasted garlic cloves and process.

Add the chickpeas, tahini, salt, lemon juice and process – taste and adjust as necessary. If it tastes good to you, then it’s right. It’s that simple.  You can see hear that this one definitely needed water.  Add a little through the feeder tube until it’s smooth.

These are supposed to be for a party, but I don’t know if they’re going to make it there!