I love chickpeas. I use chickpeas and black beans in chilli, instead of kidney beans. Chana masala is one of my favourite indian dishes to make at home. Chickpeas and spinach is still a standard comfort food for me. Hummus is the gateway food for most chickpeas lovers, most people that claim to hate chickpeas, will eat hummus.
There are lots of hummus recipes out in the world, my two favourites are Felicity Cloake’s in the Guardian and the Food 52 recipe. I’ve made both and they are both really good. Both use dried chickpeas and often I don’t have the time to soak and cook chickpeas from scratch. So most often I make hummus from a can of chickpeas and I don’t really have a recipe.
Sometimes, I add a roasted aubergine, or roasted peppers or onions. This week it was an aubergine.
Two tablespoons of tahini or (most often) peanut butter, the juice of a lemon, two or three cloves of garlic, a can of chickpeas, a teaspoon of cumin and roughly the same amount of salt.
I start with two tablespoons of tahini or peanut butter and the juice of a lemon in the food processor, scraping down the sides often and then add two or three cloves of garlic. Once that’s all incorporated, I chuck in a can of drained chickpeas, a teaspoon of cumin, a teaspoon of salt and roasted veg if I’m using (the insides of a roasted aubergine, two roasted peppers with the skins and insides removed are all good but experiment). The way to get smooth and creamy hummus is to process it more than you think it needs. When you think it looks about right, scrape the sides down and process some more. Then do it again. Then taste it and if you think it needs more seasoning, season it and process it some more. Trust me on this.
That’s how hummus mostly gets made in my house. It’s quick, simple and really useful to have in the fridge. If I’m not sure how my week is going to pan out, I’ll often just make hummus and flatbread dough because with some vegetables that is dinner!
That wasn’t helped by his father’s decision not to let him stay on at school past 14. You see Grandad was bright (the maths thing that Ma and Ben do, that came from Grandad) but you had to pay for school past 14 in 1928 and I’m guessing that my great grandfather couldn’t afford it.
If you had asked me about him when I was little, I would have told you that Grandad worked three days a week, came for dinner on Tuesdays and came over on Saturday mornings, usually bringing us pocket money and lots of fruit and kit kats. Ma banned sweets, the other cousins got sweets (and I’m still not over it!). He belonged to the Salvation Army and he went to Belgium on the ferry from Ramsgate, for two weeks every year and came back very tanned and with Toberones for all.
We also watered everything. The strawberries have flowers
As do the broad beans
Everything else is doing it’s thing. Check out my blueberry sticks
And we got rhubarb and chard to take home
Amazing what a bit of hot weather does….
Last year, all my summer clothes and sandals pretty much gave up the ghost. A couple of weekends ago, Ma and I did some shopping and this weekend we’ve did some more. I now have 4 new pairs of linen trousers, 4 new tops and I’ve ordered 3 pairs of summer shoes and bought a pair of sandals for work. I feel very poor and now that I have summer clothes am expecting it to start raining any minute now…
Yesterday was a year since my lovely friends came and put my shed up. The shed has made having an allotment much easier, although Ma would still like it to be more tidy!
Plans for this week are very few, keep on top of the greenhouse in the living room. I’m waiting for the courgettes, summer squash, cucumbers and basil to put their heads up then I’ll sow more tomatoes, winter squash, kale, chard and sweetcorn although possibly not all this week. On Thursday, we’re going to see the Avengers movie but other than that I’m going to work at getting more sleep!
(If you realise halfway through that your stick blender as died, then what I did was transfer everything to the small bowl of my magimix and pray. That worked!)
I much prefer it to the stuff you buy in bottles and I will try it in potato salad when summer comes around.
Remember the list from last week? Here it is, with what I got done crossed off…
I also weeded the raspberries and pulled this one up from the broad bean fence
Check out the leaves on the blueberries…
I sowed peas and hopefully protected them from the foxes
I also built the cloche and sowed carrots and radishes in buckets
I also sowed beetroot and salad and spinach in the salad beds and covering the beds in fleece more because of the foxes than because I think they’ll need it this week!
I was shattered at the end of the day but it looks really good and if the weather stays good this week, we’ll be doing alright.
I went home happy but dirty…
