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?!

Bread and poses

As this blog is about thrifty living, it has to include an entry about baking bread. Obviously. I started baking bread last year and was surprised that I actually managed to create something that was edible. This spurred me on to try different types of breads and very soon I was pulling out fruit loaves from the oven like there was no tomorrow (in the sense that there was no tomorrow so I didn’t have to worry about fitting into any of my clothes). One disadvantage to making bread is that you end up eating it. That’s why when the summer came, I moved on to vegetable kebabs.

But making bread has got to be one of the most satisfying things you’ll do in the kitchen. And it’s so simple, which is especially gratifying as this technological age marches on. No gadgets, no wizardry, nothing's needed but a few simple ingredients, and a little time and patience (patience, of course, being one of the things that's perhaps too often missing living in today's modern world). And that's the beauty of making bread: producing a healthy and nutritious staple of the average westerner's diet at very little cost and with such a simple process. It makes you feel completely self-sufficient, as though you wouldn't have any problem surviving come Armageddon (provided the supermarkets are still open and you can get a bag of flour and some instant yeast).

What you need to make homemade bread is a good strong flour, yeast, water, and a little oil; and in terms of apparatus, apart from an oven and a baking tray, just a bowl for mixing (although Jamie Oliver encourages us all to do away with the bowl and just mix the ingredients together on a clean counter-top – still haven’t quite managed to pull that one off, Jamie…). In terms of effort, if you're going to bake bread the "old-fashioned" way (i.e. without the use of any wizardry such as a bread-making machine), you’ll need to knead the dough to a silky and elastic texture, although the Guardian’s master baker Dan Lepard’s recipe for the perfect white loaf calls for no more than three 10-second kneading stints, which means you won’t even work up a sweat (and yes, it does produce a perfectly acceptable loaf).

You do need a bit of patience though when making bread in order to let the dough rise (prove), but again, all it takes is a couple of hours at the most. And this is something that you can just leave and come back to at the appropriate time - you don't have to stand over it and baby it while it's doing its thing.

If you place a bowl of boiling water in the bottom of the oven when you put the loaf in, you will get a lovely golden, crispy crust.

I love the way that Dan Lepard nonchalantly says that if you throw in some olives and chopped herbs you’ll get one of those “wow” breads you see in magazines. How cool is he?! As if that isn’t the ultimate goal of anyone who’s ever taken to making bread!

Once you’ve pulled one or two basic white loaves out of the oven, it’s natural to want to move on to something a little more exotic, which is where Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s fig and walnut bread recipe comes in. I didn’t use figs when I made this, but instead used dates and walnuts. The bread was excellent. Again, I placed a baking tray of boiling water in the bottom of the oven when I put the loaves in to get a nice crust on them. I would advise only making this bread when you have the opportunity for hours and hours of exercise though!