Day 1b - Olive Hummus and Pasta e Fagioli

Olive Hummus

Off to a rocky start...

Here we have one of several hummus variations that I'll be making over the next year. Now, I'm no stranger to hummus. I've made it before, using various recipes calling for different proportions of the same ingredients. And my conclusion is, it's pretty hard to make a terrible hummus.

Isa and Terry* claim that the secret to really creamy hummus is to make it in a blender vs. food processor. Now, I've tried to put similar concoctions in my blender, and it's always a recipe for failure: a thick sludge clogs the blades while four inches of ingredients perch undisturbed above.

But I was so intrigued by this claim that I ignored my inner voice of reason and needlessly dirtied my (clearly subpar) blender. Once I moved the festivities to the tried and true food processor, everything went quite creamily. (At least creamily enough for me, I&T.)

I'm happy to report, the recipe (sans blender) is sound. I used two medium-sized cloves of garlic, and for me, that's plenty. (Three would be overkill.) If I weren't adding olives, I might have amped up the lemon presence, but knowing that another flavor was going to take center stage, the lemon quotient was just right. The olives get pulsed in once the hummus is completely pureed, which is nice because they're chunky vs. invisible. I went with green ones, as you can see.

SFO: 10 
(Who doesn't love hummus? If you have friends who are scared of it, it can only mean that they have food texture issues, which I refuse to acknowledge on the SFO scale.)



Pasta e Fagioli

This is not what I think of when I think of Pasta e Fagioli. For me, that name conjures up something really soupy and vegetable-y. I would describe this more like: Pasta with Tomatoes and White Beans.

That said, it is simple, easy, and delicious, and it comes together fast. My tomatoes were pretty watery, so it took about 30 minutes to thicken the sauce, longer than I&T's suggested 20 minutes. I used ditalini pasta and cannellini beans, both well-chosen, I think.

It's a very comfort-food-y flavor profile: pasta, tomatoes, garlic, oregano, thyme, plus beans. Classic and fail-safe.

My friend Alvin arrived too hungry to weigh in on the SFO of this recipe at first. But after getting through serving #1, he felt he was able to bring some objectivity to serving #2. (Serving #2 is always a good sign....) The "King of Pants" deemed it delicious, even for meat eaters, which I'll interpret as an SFO 10. I almost took a point off for the presence of whole beans, because there are still people out there with bean-o-phobia. (I was one.) But then I decided that beans are pretty mainstream now, and everyone needs to get over it

SFO: 10

*FYI, from this point on, Isa and Terry will be referred to as I&T.