Quick and Dirty Hummus

The other night I wanted a snack between meals and remembered we had a can of chick peas (garbanzo beans) in the pantry left over from another dish. From this a very rustic, fairly tasty, and moderately quick hummus was born....

After a quick glance at a online hummus recipe to get me in the ballpark I gathered the ingredients I could find and got mixing. First, I had to find a substitute for Tahini paste (which Trader Joe's also doesn't carry). I toasted a few tablespoons of sesame seeds in a dry pan over medium heat and added them to our small food processor along with a couple teaspoons of olive oil, some salt and pepper and a couple drops of toasted sesame oil. After some grinding, the paste was a rough equivalent.

I added to that some more olive oil, a couple tablespoons of lemon juice, the can of drained chick peas, a couple cloves of minced garlic and some seasoning. I attempted to blend this into a nice hummusy paste, but being a very small food processor and there being a lot of ingredients ... this didn't work out so well. I ended up doing it in batches which worked ok, but made it hard to get a real good smooth texture.

In the end, the result was really good for my first try. Pita bread or something similar would have been better than the generic crackers we had on hand, but they weren't bad. The hummus had some decent flavor and was pretty close to the stuff you can get in a good restaurant. If I could have gotten the consistency better, I would have said it was easily better than 90% of store bought stuff and probably better for you.