Um…sorry.  I totally forgot to take a picture of the hummus after I made it and then it disappeared 45 minutes after I showed up at Beer Friday.  My bad.  I’ll make it again, I promise.

I love hummus, though I often feel a little guilty eating an entire container by myself.

And I’m sure there are plenty of calories in a box of crackers, right?  At least I got a picture of the crackers.

I was a little concerned that I’d screw up my first attempt at hummus.  My fears were compounded as I didn’t have a food processor, but would make do with just a blender.

Ingredients:

• 15 oz can of garbanzo beans
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 2 TBSP tahini paste (Why does something like this come in a gigantic jar? There’s no way I can manage to use all of this…)
• ~4 TBSP lemon juice (I probably used more than this as I taste-tested.)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp black pepper
• 4 TBSP olive oil
• 3 TBSP sugar
• 1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes

Directions:

1. Drain the garbanzo beans, careful to keep the liquid.
2. Dump the beans and garlic cloves into a blender.  (I suspect that a food processor will work better, but you make do with what you got.)
3. Chop it up.  This wasn’t a smooth process at all.  The blades spin around, quickly annihilating any beans in the way, but most of the beans end up unchopped off to the side.  With a spatula, I worked the beans down towards the blades.  Nonetheless, the blades weren’t really chopping things up as I’d dreamed.
4. I threw in some lemon juice, tahini and it still wasn’t hummus-like.
5. But…then I threw in half of the liquid from the garbanzo bean can…and presto!  The liquid gave the blades something to mix and it almost magically turned into something that looked like hummus.
6. Add olive oil, salt, and blend.
7. At this point, the hummus was a bit bitter, so I threw in a little sugar to cut the bitter and added some more lemon juice to add tartness.
8. I tossed in a small handful of sun-dried tomatoes and blended it up, giving it a nice rosy color and a subtle hint of an extra something.

Yield: about 3 cups

Truthfully, I wasn’t sure how it would be received, but I was happy to see it disappeared quickly.