A few months ago my friend Viv (Hi Viv!) gave me a recipe for hummous that her Dad had made (Thanks Viv! Thanks Viv’s Dad!). It was very very nice. I’ve since been messing around with it trying to make a red pepper hummous and I think I’ve finally got it perfect. Yipeeee. This recipe makes LOADS, I think you can freeze it, but I’ve never tried. It’s crazy, this whole batch probably cost about £1.50 to make, and is the equivalent of around 5 of those silly little pots you get at the shops, which I think are about a quid each and contain enough for about 2 sandwiches. Since the first time I made it I can’t bring myself to buy them any more. Yeah, so maybe there’s a bit of hassle, soak the beans, boil the beans blah blah blah, but you end up with much nicer, fresher, tasty hummous, you can add whatever you want to it and people are always like reet impressed that you have made it. Ha ha. You can probably make it with canned chickpeas, but they are nowhere near as nice. This is the same in anything ie curries etc which have chickpeas in, it is well worth going to the effort of soaking and boiling rather than just buying a can. They taste different, and have a different texture. Here’s the recipe:

Red Pepper Hummous

• 225g chickpeas
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 4 tbsp tahini
• 4 bay leaves
• 1/2 an onion
• 5 cloves of garlic
• 2 red peppers
• Salt and Pepper
• 4 tbsp olive oil

1. Soak the chickpeas over night, or longer. Then put them in a pan of cold water, cover plus extra as they will expand a little more. Put the bay leaves, 1/2 onion (cut in half again) and 3 garlic cloves cut in half into the water, bring to boil then simmer for 1.5 hours or until tender.
2. When the chickpeas are done, drain (keep the cooking liquid) and pick out the bay leaves, but leave the onion and garlic in. Set aside to cool a little while you are roasting the peppers.
3. Put peppers in oven (220) with a drizzle of olive oil and some black pepper until they start to go black at edges.
4. Put the chickpeas, peppers, lemon juice, tahini, 2 cloves of garlic, approx 4 tbsp olive oil, salt and pepper into food processor and zzuzzz ( I don’t know what this word should be? Blend? No that’s not right.. erm zzuzzz will do) until smooth. Open it up and check the consistency, you normally need to add a little of the cooking liquid from the chickpeas to get it right.
5. That’s it.

This goes really good on jacket potatoes. Never thought of having hummous on jacket potatoes until a few weeks ago when my boss at work had it. It is amazing. Mmm. Sometimes if you leave this in the fridge for a day or so it seems to soak up more liquid and go a funny texture, just add more olive oil until it is right again.