Monday, January 29, 2007

Red Pepper Hummus

Roasted Red Pepper Hummus

Ingredients:

1 15 oz can of garbanzo beans
tahini (sesame paste)
roasted red peppers
roasted garlic cloves
extra virgin olive oil
lemon juice
black pepper
salt


The tahini looks like pale peanut butter. I only bought it for making hummus or adding to homemade white bean spread

My lemon is still wrapped up; it was from our back yard. Our lone lemon from our nearly barren tree. I had extra lemons in case I didn't get enough juice form this. It was pretty big.

These are "pepitas" (pumpkin seeds) that I got from Henry's. I bought red pepper hummus before from Whole Foods and noticed they had pepitas in the ingredients. This ingredient is optional.
Here are some roasted garlic cloves. No, I didn't use the whole container. I just put in 6 cloves. You can also use RAW garlic, but your breath will be pretty strong afterwards and the next day too! And if you fart...watch out!

These were the roasted red peppers. The jar I bought had whole peppers. I just cut one up. You can buy jars of roasted peppers already cut into strips. I'd recommend that to save you some time.

Directions:
Dump the garbanzos into your blender. Save a little of the liquid
Pour in a tiny bit of the olive oil (1/8th cup? I don't really measure) - depends
Add maybe 1 tbsp or more of tahini
Squeeze your lemons (ha ha) - it's up to you how much you want to put in
Add the roasted red pepper strips
Add your garlic cloves (# TBD by you)
*optional - a small handful of pepitas
Puree mixture until smooth
Add salt and pepper to taste and puree again.
Here's how it looks before pureeing.

Here's how it should look like once you're done.
I just made this on Saturday and it's almost gone. We've eaten it with fresh vegetables, like carrot and celery sticks, sugar snap peas, rice crackers (Hazelnut crackers by Blue Diamond nut company), even pieces of romain lettuce hearts. I'm sure you can also eat this with toasted pita wedges or other types of vegetable crudites.
Oh yeah, you can also double the recipe but the mixture might be too thick for your blender. That was my downfall the first few times I made this. Now I just do one batch at a time.
Enjoy!

Sweet Potato fries

Sweet Potato Fries

ingredients:

2 bags ofTrader Joe's Sweet Potato spears ($2.49 each)
extra virgin olive oil
sea salt
fresh ground black pepper

Dump the pre-peeled and pre-cut sweet potato spears into a baking dish. Try to make it single layer, but what the hell, I didn't.

Drizzle or lightly brush the olive oil over the spears.

Sprinkle with salt and pepper

Bake at 400 F for 20-25 minutes.

Another close up...