Since we’ve been back in the United States, we’ve been trying to re-learn how to cook cheap AND healthy in the land of cheap meat/dairy and vegetables priced as though they were gold. One thing we’ve missed is hummus. Hummus is a kind of middle eastern bean dip – good for filling you up with healthy proteins and fat, and great with fresh veggies like cucumbers and peppers. In the US it’s terrible and expensive. So, we set out to make it ourselves and have arrived at a pretty satisfactory recipe. If we were still living in Israel, I think I’d make this version rather than buy it!
1 16 oz can of chickpeas or garbanzo beans – they’re the same thing, you know. (I’m not sure how much this is if you start from dry beans)
1/4 cup liquid from can of chickpeas (or the cooking liquid if you started from dry beans)
3.5 tablespoons lemon juice (depending on taste)
2 tablespoons tahini
2 cloves garlic, crushed – (SERIOUSLY NO MORE THAN THIS!!! Vern added half a head the first time…)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2.5 tablespoons olive oil
Blend it all up in a food processor and blender. Some people even like it a bit chunky, so you could do it by hand if you needed to. I mean, who needs all those gadgets?
Once you’re set up with the basic ingredients (many of which you likely already have) they last a long time. Now we just go through 2 cans of beans a week. Not bad. And if you’re feeling creative, you can add all kinds of fun stuff. Sun-dried tomatoes, roasted peppers, olives…
This is enough for Vernon for a few days, but he eats an inordinate amount… A couple ounces of this, plus a cucumber and a bell pepper is a good lunch once you’re used to thinking this way.
The ever-morphing family cookbook 
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