Heavenly hummus

As well as excess body hair and zero resistance to gravity, old age also brings a certain OCD approach to some commercially produced foods. At least for me it does. Like a lot of people, I don’t like seeing too many ingredients I don’t recognise the names of in lists attached to the products I buy. And in something as simple as hummus, which is really just mashed chick peas, there shouldn’t be too much else involved (even I know that). But it’s perhaps not only a question of ingredients control, making your own means you get to make it just the way you like it. And while I haven’t done the math (as they say), I’m sure it works out less expensive than buying the commercially produced stuff in the supermarket.

While I had been meaning to make my own hummus for a while, I wasn’t too sure how easy it would be to get tahini paste (even when the idea had occurred to me back home in Blighty). But apparently it’s very easy – even in the outback here. So I got out the blender and found a Jamie Oliver recipe online. All very straightforward: 4 oz of chick peas, 2 tbs of tahini paste, a couple of crushed garlic cloves, and some lemon juice. The first batch I made was good: the right consistently, and a good garlicky taste. However, I then decided to up the quantity and it seemed the blender couldn’t quite cope and I was left with a slightly course hummus with the old half or quarter of chick pea hidden in the mix. Admittedly the blender isn’t that great but if it can crush ice then surely it can squash up a few chick peas.

And then I stumbled upon an article on the Guardian website where the issue of the perfect hummus was discussed and I picked up a few good tips.

1. If you’re boiling dried chick peas, you need to boil them so that they are mushy.
2. You need to add a little liquid to the ingredients in order to get a creamy consistency to your hummus (if boiling dried chick peas, save a little of the cooking liquid; if using tinned, use water – not that horrible gloopy stuff that’s preserving them!).
3. If using tinned chick peas, it’s best to take the skins off. This may sound a bit tricky but all you need to do is to rinse them and then place them in a bowl of water and gently rub the chick peas between your fingers and the skins will come off. They will float to the top of the water and then you can just skim them off.

Three great little tips that mean now my blender is able to cope with blending my hummus and I get a nice consistency to it. Technology – great, eh?!

Tree Stone Bakery

There’s a delectable little bakery over the road that makes me feel as though I’m living back in England at times. Admittedly, there’s usually a huge 4x4 parked outside whenever I go in, and the shop itself is situated on a busy main road along which more 4x4s and pick-up trucks thunder pass, but you can’t win them all.

What’s so lovely about this little place – and it is little – is that there’s usually something different in there every time I go in. They don’t seem to stick to the usual fare. I think the master baker must like to experiment. So far I’ve tried three different loaves, the baguette (excellent!), and a few pastries. Last week I had a poppy seed pastry (pictured). It wasn’t made in the usual way with the poppy seeds scattered throughout the pastry, but rather with a lump of poppy seeds (more a sort of spawn of them), dolloped in the middle. And it was delicious!

What’s also nice about this place is that they put all the goods in natty little brown paper bags which carry their logo. And this helps me feel at home when I walk from the bakery to my house (which is a few blocks away). Mainly because I am actually walking home carrying a loaf of bread which I’ve bought in a bakery. Something I took for granted when I lived in England, but which living here in Alberta, I rarely get to do, mainly because these little independent bakeries are few and far between (although having said that, I now recall there’s another one three or four blocks around the corner from the Tree Stone!). But that one’s not as quaint as the Tree Stone, nor does it have a little door chime that sounds every time you walk in and out.

They say that surrounding yourself with things that remind you of home can help with feelings of homesickness - especially when those things are poppy seed pastries and baguettes!