No Pork Involved

Anyone got a good recipe for hummus?

I have been trying to eat healthier stuff in the middle of the day. My dream is to return to the kibbutz plan. Breakfast and dinner light but similar. Midday meal bigger, with meat.

Here is a horrible admission. I don’t really endorse total gluttony. When you want really good food, you should use good, unhealthy ingredients. But you can’t eat that crap all the time or in unlimited amounts. Sadly. And gluttony is a sin. Or close to it. And just about every health problem I have is fat-related.

So I would like to reform the one daily meal which gives me real problems. Breakfast and dinner I can control. Lunch gets crazy, because I forget to eat, and then my blood sugar drops, and then I find myself chugging from the honey jar and following up with a bowl of Sour Patch Kids.

When I was a kibbutz volunteer, we started the day with a big dish of nothing, at 5 a.m. Then at 8, we had breakfast. In fact, that was the end of my workday. Pick a cubic yard of grapefruit per day, and you’re free, regardless of the hour. At breakfast time on the kibbutz, they had big carts loaded with fresh vegetables and dairy stuff, as well as hummus, eggs, and porridge. Which is thick Cream of Wheat. I think.

It was a good deal. I would eat a couple of steamed eggs (seriously), with cottage cheese, sour cream, toast, and vegetables. At night, we got the same thing, so we didn’t go to bed stuffed. And fiber was not a problem. Especially since I ate a grapefruit every day on the job.

Those steamed eggs were the weak link in the chain. I have no idea where they got the idea of steaming eggs, but the machine that did it turned out some very strange items. Sometimes you’d peel an egg and find a burned place inside it. And the yolks were green. Perhaps out of respect for the prophet Samuel I Am.

Lunch was usually a bit lame, but healthy.

The other day I bought hummus and pita and vegetables. And as you probably can guess, a tiny container of hummus cost around forty thousand dollars. Okay, maybe a little less. But it was a lot. Today I made my own, and I got a pint for maybe a buck.

I was worried that the online recipes I had found were no good, so I used my own judgment. Two cans of garbanzo beans, juice of two lemons, four cloves garlic, teaspoon cumin, quarter-teaspoon salt, two tablespoons olive oil, and roughly a quarter of a cup of Crystal hot sauce. Which was not nearly enough. I didn’t put tahini in it, because I wasn’t sure tahini was standard.

Figured out a couple of things. First of all, lemon juice is stupid. I seem to recall this from making my own tahini in the past. It’s just not acidic enough. Next time, vinegar. Second, don’t add any liquid until you have all the ingredients in there, because it’s real easy to make it too wet.

It was okay, but I think tahini is needed. I can’t believe how much hot sauce it soaked up. Next time, I think I’ll blend a couple of fresh cayennes into it. I think that with a little effort, I should be able to blow away the store stuff for maybe an eighth of the cost.