Roasted Red Pepper Hummus

Basic Hummus:
Ingredients:
1 16 oz can garbanzo beans
1/2 cup liquid from the can
3-5 Tbsp lemon juice
1/3 cup tahini
1-2 Tbsp olive oil


Puree in blender (or food processor) until smooth as you like it.  Add more bean liquid, lemon juice or oil to thin it, or add more garbanzos or tahini to thicken it.



Since I don't cook with garlic, I add:
~1/2 can black olives 
sliced jalepenos, to taste (I use at least 10 slices)


If you add just enough olive and just enough jalepeno, you end up with a wonderful non-flavored hummus with just the right amount of bite and full flavor.

For roasted red pepper hummus, I added 1 heaping teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes and 1 generous tablespoon of Sriracha hot sauce.


Plain hummus is very adaptable - you can add whatever you'd like!  Perhaps surplus salad greens like spinach and kale?

Roasted Red Peppers
Put some red peppers on a tray.  Remove the stems.  You can leave them whole, or cut them in half and seed them first if you want.  Preheat the oven to at least 400 degrees, then turn on the broiler.

Broil on one side until the skin is black and bubbly.

Using a pair of tongs, flip over the peppers.  Broil until skin is black and bubbly.

When they are done, place them in a paper bag and close the bag.  Let sit for a few minutes. This traps the heat making the skin easier to peel off. 

If you left the peppers whole, cut out top first to get as many seeds out with one motion as possible.  Then you can squeeze the pepper from the bottom up like a tube of toothpaste to get most of the seeds out.

After I seeded and peeled the peppers, I pureed them in my tiny food processor and added them to the basic hummus recipe (above).