Hummus is something I don't make enough. It's one of the world's simplest dishes, especially for those of us with food processors, and it accomodates any number of crudités. In the past, I have always used a recipe from Marie Simmons's Fresh and Fast, but now of course I strive to figure out the most time-consuming way to do anything, so that one won't do.

So last night I decided to just come up with my own. I barely simmered some dried garbanzo beans in water with your basic mirepoix of carrot, leek and celery, until the beans were chewable but not mushy. Then I just let them soak in their cooking water for a while. Overnight, to be precise (this is adapted from Judy Rodgers's Zuni Café Cookbook the bible of "there must be a harder way to do this" cooking; she would have had me make the hummus in a mortar and pestle, I'm sure). In the morning, I puréed them with some minced conserved lemon I made six weeks ago. This was adapted from Eric Ripert's A Return to Cooking, though Judy has her own version, as does Jeremiah Tower in his recent cookbook. Basically, you pack quartered lemons in salt, put in a Mason jar (I don't think I put them in boiling water to seal them), and refrigerate for at least a month and up to three. The salt quickly becomes a dense brine as it leaches all the lemon juice out of the fruit. I turned them every few days to keep the lemon awash with the brine.

Tres yummy, those lemons, and they added a very nice flavor note to the hummus (you actually use the skin, and discard the flesh). So flavor-wise, my hummus tasted very nice. The lemon made it taste very fresh and alive, with a little zing.

The texture needs some work. I puréed the beans with what was left of their cooking liquid, as well as a fair amount of olive oil, but I think I needed more oil. They just weren't very fluffy. Still, for an improv job I was pretty happy with it. I served it with (of course) pita triangles and carrot batons. I could also see adding some parsley, but I didn't have any on hand.

Costs:
Pita bread: approx. $3.50
Garbanzo beans: $2 or so for a 1-lb bag, of which I used maybe a third.
Carrot was leftover from the stock stuff, as was all the goodies I cooked the beans with.
Total cost: $5.50
posted by Derrick at 10:58 PM

It is probably not coincidental that this blog suffers when my other blog is rife with updates. After all, that blog usually involves expensive meals and time-consuming food activity.

Still, I have been putting forth some effort to eat cheaply. Or at least to do some eating cheaply infrastructure. In this case, stocks. You'll find lots of cookbooks which tell you how useful it is to have a "well-stocked" pantry, and they're right. While it's always useful to have even canned chicken broth around, it's much nicer to have homemade renditions you can control more precisely. Sure they take a lot of time, but most of the time requires no attention on your part.

My first stock was a shellfish stock made mostly with the crab we had in mid-December. I had saved all the shells and stuck them in the freezer, and finally got around to throwing them into a pot of water. I made it in the same way you would make a fumet, the delicate fish stock, but I had to cook everything for longer to get the flavor I wanted in the stock. I'm hoping to use it as the base for a sauce I might make this coming weekend.

My second stock was a beef stock. A friend of mine, whose cooking knowledge I not-so-secretly crave and idolize, read my New Year's Eve post where I complained about my lackluster beef stock for my French Onion Soup. He suggested oxtails for the necessary texture. So yesterday I started the stock, and I left Melissa with instructions for finishing it today (I put it in the fridge overnight, and heaven only knows what that did, but I didn't want to leave an unattended open flame overnight either). In total, it probably cooked for nine or ten hours. A good long time. The flavor wasn't very strong when it was all done, but a little reducing solved that problem. But there's no denying that the texture was lovely. Even when still hot in its plastic container, it jiggled around in a not-quite-liquid way. He says that the oxtails can be used again to make a weaker glace de viande (an extreme reduction; demi-glace cut in half). I'm dubious, given how long they were in there already, but it doesn't cost anything to try.

Which, incidentally, is one of the great things about oxtails. They're way cheap, at $4/lb from Berkeley Bowl. So a couple pounds of oxtails, and I get lots and lots of stock.
posted by Derrick at 12:18 AM