The Stuff Next to an Empty Brita Filter1

In case you didn't follow the title link, hummus, is that stuff.² The near-ubiquitous³ garbanzo bean dip⁴ is cheap, easy, and delicious. It may seem like some exotic middle-eastern spread, but that's about as full of stereotypes as these pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal as the (shirtless) Prince of Persia. Yes, the video game Prince of Persia (a startling likeness, indeed). Admission: those last two sentences were mere conduits for the JG near-nudie pics. Good thing they let me set my own desktop wallpaper at work.


Back to task: I've had Papa Bull's hummus recipe for the last couple years, and have used it basically any time that I intended to make hummus. "Hummus recipe" is a bit of a stretch. All it really requires is putting some basic and common goodies in a food processor in proportions that you find pleasing. I (barely) upped the ante by adding roasted garlic to this batch. Now, I may have mentioned during my discussion of Tzatziki that I was having trouble finding good tahina in Seattle. Joyva never has been up to snuff in my book. As it turns out, I was just looking for love in all the wrong places. The right place to look was the Latin American market down next to Pike Place. Obvi. That's where I found a container of Cortas, which was right up my alley. Incidentally, that link to the Cortas tahina is from latinmerchant.com. I am confused. Nevertheless, the tahina is just what you want: creamy and sesamey (FWIW, I've had the best luck with lebanese tahina). Grab some and have at this:

{+} Papa Bull's Hummus

Hummus
1 Large batch

2 15oz cans of Chickpeas
8oz (half 16oz jar) Tahina
1 head of garlic (for roasting)
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
2 Tbsp Lemon Juice
S & P to taste
Paprika and Parsley for plating

1. Roast the garlic by cutting the top off of each clove (while leaving the cloves all attached), drizzling it with olive oil, and putting it in the oven @ 350 for 30 minutes or so (until the cloves are soft and can be pried out with a fork).

2. While the garlic roasts, gather your ingredients. The only trick here is that when you drain your chickpeas, keep the liquid. You'll need it for adjusting the hummus consistency. Also, if you're using raw garlic, three large cloves should do the trick quite nicely.

3. Put it all in the food processor.

4. Process until smooth. Salt, pepper, and lemon to taste. Add chickpea juices until just a bit thinner than desired. It will firm up as it cools.
5. If you've got the time, let it sit in the fridge over night. The flavors become much richer and deeper, and the garlic will mellow out.

Plate it with a sprinkle of paprika, a drizzle of olive oil, and a few leaves of parsley and serve it with crackers, pita, cheese, falafel, on sandwiches, or any other way you please. I big-spoon it religiously.

There's also been quite a bit going on in the world of food politics these days. I can't help but reflect on some of it here, but I've collapsed it for your sake. There's a whole slew of good links in there, so I do recommend taking a look and seeing if any of it piques your interest.

{+} Four assorted hand-wavings at recent food news that didn't fit elsewhere

1. I resisted the urge to make a poach pun in my most recent post. Over at IFA, they were not so lucky. Who uses those egg poachers when you can have an adventure like this one?

2. I updated my del.icio.us. Things I've cooked are now tagged 'cooked'. Things I haven't cooked but intend to are tagged 'cook', as in 'to cook'. Blogs I follow regularly are marked 'RSS'. This is great if you're a voyeur and want to see how I spend a good percentage my web-bound life.

3. This very long, ostensibly academic article, has been showing up on food blogs all over the internetz. The inattention paid to the underlying politics of the article has really raised my hackles. Overall, it's near-sighted, anti-progress, philosophy-abusing,⁵ correlation-construed-as-causation idiocy. I can't decide whether it's worth it to respond to the article's central claim that the "moralization" of food (i.e., that there are 'right' and 'wrong' things to eat) is a byproduct rise of sexual freedom in the twentieth-century. The very basic cum hoc ergo propter hoc relationship between the moralization of food and sexual libertinism is plain fallacy; the actual arc of the application of ethics to the realms of food and sex is one that was dictated by some common ethico-historical roots, rather than any sort of brute causality. While the article makes some very true historical observations, what's been crafted out of them is at the very best disingenuous. Even giving this much of a response feels like affording the "policy piece" an undue amount of credibility. It feels like talking to a Fox News anchor. I'd be interested to hear other people's comments on the subject and the article.

4. Mother Jones has a number of great food related pieces: MarkyBman has a podcast interview, which has a few interesting tidbits: when he's asked about why he decided to write his book now, he quips that it "has nothing to do with Omnivore's Dilemma;" he says schools should teach home economics again; and, he gives a shout out to fritatta recipes, which makes me excited because I've got some nice pics of a caramelized-onion, red pepper, gruyere fritatta that I made last week and should become a post pretty soon. Another MJ piece is an interview with Michael Pollan, where he talks about being a journalist and activist, takes shots at the agribusiness-supporting Tom Vilsack, who was just named Obama's Secretary of Agriculture, worries about the efficacy and pragmatism of biofuels, and speaks to something that I worried about in footnote 3, the democratization of local, organic, and sustainable food. Finally, MJ has an article about the complexities of the food industry which go beyond mass production vs. local food sources--an important read, if you feel you lack perspective on today's food politics.

Go make hummus. It's worth it.

Love,
Peter

Now I feel like I need another bit of food porn to balance things out. My haul from the Ballard farmers' market:



Beets and carrots. Also in the image is a book I just received, On Food and Cooking, which is a classic on science in the kitchen. Look for more sciencey posts soon!

¹ Hummus.

² Full disclosure: I may or may not be posting to regain some face after Kibbee and Rachel showed me up with a phenomenal looking pizza.

³ That I call hummus "near-ubiquitous" not only shows the acuteness of SWPL's satire, it lends credence to the accusations of classism/elitism that have plagued the slow-food/foodie/organic/locavore movements. At least since the middle of the 20th century there has been a financial divide between good food and junk food. Nowadays, most of the members of these food-related movements don't want to admit that there is financial floor to being part of the club. In many ways, they should be right about this. Take hummus as an example: the ingredients are cheap and readily available. However, it takes time to find the ingredients at the grocery store, and it takes time to put them together into hummus. It seems like both time, and other social factors that influence the desire to make food at home serve to separate the slow foodies from the rest of the nation. How one goes about changing a situation like this is not entirely clear, but some suggestions and perspective is offered by the recent articles in Mother Jones that I link to later in the post.

⁴ In a bizarre case of planetary alignment Kevin over at Food Junta just posted a white bean spread (read: hummus without chickpeas or tahina) recipe. Our moon cycles must be in sync. I confess to being too hummus-smitten to have made a white bean spread, but I will one of these days.

⁵ If you're going to mention Aristotle and Nietzsche, have more background than Bartlett's Quotations at your back. Especially if you're publishing in a policy journal. To say that Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values" was about free love is about as stupid as saying that Einstein invented gravity. Furthermore, the oblique association of Nietzsche, Hitler, and Vegetarianism in the same footnote is about as calumnious as it gets. And please, if you're going to make gestures at having any idea what you're talking about in the realm of philosophy, spell simpliciter correctly.