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Today, May 13, is International Hummus Day. I guess there's a day for everything! Joe Yonan's book, Cool Beans is this month's book for the online cookbook club I participate in so I'm ready to celebrate with a few hummus recipes (and one bean dip 🙃), all made with Rancho Gordo beans. First up is the Perfectly Simple and Light Hummus, with a sprinkle of smoked paprika. This one is written to use canned chickpeas but I didn't have any so I used the ones I'd cooked. It uses relatively little tahini and no oil in the recipe so I was generous in pouring it on top. Next, we have the Black Chickpea Hummus with Black Garlic and Preserved Lemon. Lots of umami and nutty, earthy flavors in this one, brightened by the preserved lemon which is blended into the hummus and also used as a garnish. The book includes a recipe where this hummus is used as a base for roasted cauliflower that's really good. Today, I made Little Sesame's Creamy, Fluffy Hummus. Little Sesame is a restaurant in DC and is apparently the origin of this recipe. The chickpeas are to be cooked with baking soda to make them super soft. I don't find that Rancho Gordo beans need that so I left it out but gave the beans a good cook. This recipe uses both fresh garlic and garlic confit, slow-cooked in olive oil which adds a note of sweetness and complexity. That same garlicky oil is poured on top to serve and this is indeed a very fluffy, pillowy hummus. Last up is a Harissa-Roasted Carrot and White Bean Dip that I made with Rancho Gordo Alubia Blanca beans. I like the flavors and thought the little beans looked very cute as a garnish. Happy International Hummus Day!

Today is International Hummus Day so lunch was this Roasted Beet Hummus Bowl with Turmeric Tahini and Peanut Dukkah from Joe Yonan's Cool Beans, made with Little Sesame's Creamy, Fluffy Hummus from the same book, served with the Fluffy (and Crisp) Flatbreads from The Cook You Want To Be.

Thanks! I have the black garbanzos from Rancho Gordo. The are an Italian variety also known as ceci neri. They are smaller than regular chickpeas, they take longer to cook and the skin remains fairly firm even after the interior of the bean becomes soft and creamy. I think that textural contrast is their best feature so I like them in salads, etc. I'm not sure that hummus was their best use but it does use their cooking liquid which is very flavorful compared to regular garbanzos and I like the black garlic and preserved lemon mixed with the earthy beans so I'm glad I tried it. In the photo below, you can see the size differences. Regular garbanzos on the left and black garbanzos on the right. In each case, the raw beans are in the top row and cooked below. Due to the lighting, the cooked black garbanzos look a bit darker here and the ones used as a garnish for the black chickpea hummus in my previous post are a better representation.

A riff on a recipe in Joe Yonan's Cool Beans for roasted cauliflower served on black chickpea hummus with black garlic and preserved lemon. The cauliflower gets rubbed first with a mix of garlic, lemon zest and olive oil. Towards the end of the roast, it’s brushed with tahini and sprinkled with za'atar and black sesame seeds, roasted further to brown evenly and served on a bed of that black chickpea hummus. The cauliflower is supposed to be roasted whole but I broke it up into florets and there are supposed to be crunchy spiced roasted chickpeas to garnish but I failed to allow enough time to make them and went with arugula dressed with lemon and olive oil instead. Scooped everything up with some of the Fluffy (and crisp) Flatbreads from The Cook You Want To Be. Edited to add: here's a photo of that black chickpea hummus which I made with Rancho Gordo's black garbanzos. It's rather murky looking stuff but it tastes pretty good.

I really like your blackboard and need to try something similar. Since my big fridge broke, I've got an apartment sized one which gets over crowded and I tend to miss things until it's too late. I can try sticking a white board to that fridge and get myself some nice colored dry-erase markers to make it fun! Sounds like you're good on the asparagus but I'll toss out an idea or two anyway. In her book, Ruffage, Abra Berens has a "recipe" for pan-roasted asparagus with yogurt + shaved radishes that's barely more complicated than just roasting it but looks very pretty: If you have Josh McFadden's book, Six Seasons, there's a great recipe for Raw Asparagus Salad with Breadcrumbs, Walnuts & Mint on p 73. I've seen it online, too, so I suspect you can find it. It's a great way to show off really fresh, first of the season asparagus. You can top it with grilled salmon or throw in some beans to make it more of a meal. Also in Six Seasons is the recipe for Pasta alla Gricia with Slivered Sugar Snap Peas which is one of my most-made dishes. It uses twice the amount of vegetables as pasta and works equally well with slivered asparagus. I could go on but I think I should shut up now. Oh, wait. One more on the mint. Eric Kim's Korean American has a super easy recipe for Salt-and-Pepper Ribs with Fresh Mint Sauce. The ribs are cooked quickly in the oven and the mint sauce is the perfect bright contrast to them. OK. I need to address my own veg collection now!

I'm not dying to make one but I don't think that looks bad at all. Crispy tortilla, layers of meat as thin as a McD's burger 🙃. Is the meat seasoned with taco seasoning? Is there cheese? What is the yellow stuff? Looks too liquid to be cheese but too yellow to be Big Mac sauce. Are there pickles?

Wow, what a treat! That sounds like a lot of fun. Do let us know if it's as delicious as it sounds and Happy Birthday to John!

Hetty Lui McKinnon's book, Tenderheart, has a recipe for a no-churn Fennel and Black Pepper Ice Cream. It uses both fennel seeds and chopped fresh fennel which get blended with sweetened condensed milk, cream, ground black pepper and a little olive oil. It just gets frozen and scooped. I found my Blendtec did a good job on the fennel but I didn't care for the texture of the seed particles. I could have put it through a sieve but decided to just freeze it in a Creami container and give it a spin to take care of those seedy bits and I thought it worked well. It's supposed to get a drizzle of olive oil but I forgot. The flavors make for an appealing, almost palate-cleansing effect.

I reheated a couple of the sopes I made the other day in the CSO and they came out nice and crispy. Filled with black bean purée, pepper jack cheese, scrambled egg and TJ's Green Dragon hot sauce. Pico de gallo and avocado on the side

The breads are really good, take almost zero effort, require no oven and reheat nicely from the freezer. The yogurt gives them the kind of tang that usually takes a much longer to develop. I'm scooping up some hummus with one right now! Compared with the online recipe, in the book he gives the option of using melted butter, ghee or olive oil, gives a 60-90 min rise time, has you place the rolled out dough on an oiled sheet pan and flip so both sides get coated and doesn’t put additional oil in the skillet.

Yesterday, I made a batch of the Fluffy (and crisp) Flatbreads from The Cook You Want to Be by Andy Baraghani so I reheated one, topped it with a thick layer of the black bean purée from yesterday's sopes and some grated pepper jack cheese and put that back into the oven to get all melty. I planned to scramble an egg and make a folded breakfast sandwich but I couldn't resist frying the duck egg instead so I needed a knife and fork but didn't mind. With avocado and pico de gallo.

I'm glad you are home and up to posting and that you had good nursing care. Sorry about the food, the bed, the insurance issues and the long drive home. Sending healing thoughts!

Thanks for the tip, I picked up a bottle. Mine had a harvest date of April-Jun 2023 so around 6 months older than the olive oil I have from Katz Farm and Frantoio Grove here in California. I must arrange a tasting 🙃 Also, TJ's has Mobay cheese once again @ $6.99/5 oz piece. That's the Wisconsin cheese with layers of goat and sheep cheese separated by a layer of ash and the name is a play on the French Morbier which is a cow's milk cheese but also features that ash streak.

I know you want to know the pan temp but it’s a lot easier and more relevant to a lot of cooking to measure the temp of the pan’s contents - water for low temp, oil to go higher. I assume you did that first but only read back to the IR thermometer part. if you want to visualize that hot spot in the middle, a thin layer of granulated sugar will show it to you. Its melting point is 367°F

Black bean sopes from Cool Beans I used the red corn masa harina from Masienda and they're filled with a black bean purée, feta cheese, arugula dressed with lime juice and Trader Joe's Green Dragon sauce.

Flavour: Over 100 fabulously flavourful recipes with a Middle-Eastern twist (eG-friendly Amazon.com link)by Sabrina Ghayour, a March 2024 release is currently $1.99 on Amazon in the US and Canada. I need another Middle Eastern cookbook like I need a another hole in my head but I've got some credits so I caved anyway.

I'd wager the mix of bacteria used are pretty similar, though probably not exact. In both processes, they fractionate the cream from the skim milk prior to culturing the crème fraîche or future butter so they're working with a high fat substrate so it makes sense they'd have some similarities. Any commercial entity producing a fermented product at scale tends to keep their bacterial strains confidential. Even if they deposit samples in a public biobank as part of a patent or trademark process, they're probably not the exact same cultures used in production. I found these strains listed as being used to culture butter here: Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris Lactococcus lactis subsp. lactis biovar. diacetylactis Leuconostoc mesenteroides subsp. cremoris (Leuc. citrovorum) The strains listed for crème fraîche production tend to be much the same crowd, although like here, where they list the first 3 strains above, they also say things like, "often others," and probably won't cough up the exact cocktail of bugs.

I really enjoyed yesterday's beans on toast so I had almost the same thing today. Beet greens as the veg and Rancho Gordo ceci neri (black garbanzos) as the bean:

I'm thinking you wanted to know more detail than what Vermont Creamery includes in this little cartoon, but it's as @pastrygirl said: pasteurize the fresh, fluid milk -> add live bacterial culture -> ferment -> churn into butter.

Beans on toast, inspired by the recipe for Garlicky Great Northern Beans with Broccoli Rabe over Toast from Joe Yonan's book, Cool Beans. Rancho Gordo caballero beans and garlicky broccolini on toasted multigrain bread with chili oil and pecorino Romano.

Char sui bao I picked up at the local farmers market

I got halibut in this week's fish share and picked up ingredients to make a recipe from Sunday Suppers at Lucques but got lazy and decided on this very quick and easy Soy-Brined Halibut with Mustard Greens, Sesame and Lime from Dining In. The fish gets brined for an hour or two in a mix of soy sauce, rice vinegar and water, then poached in a similar mixture of soy sauce, sesame oil and water. The greens get tossed into the pan to cook along with the fish. Lime juice is added to the liquid in the pan and it's spooned over the fish and greens. I subbed beet greens instead of mustard greens as it's what was on hand. To avoid turning the fish pink and to allow for a longer cooking time for the beet greens, I cooked them separately. With the low-sodium soy sauce I used, the brine was pretty dilute so I'll probably add more soy sauce or reduce the amount of water next time to make it more concentrated. Nice, quick meal.

I'm so glad you are back home, @Kim Shook! No need to apologize or feel like you have to “catch up” unless you want to. I don’t eat a big evening meal so I rarely post in the Dinner topic and even if I did, I could never keep up with all the posts over there!

I used smoked sablefish to make the sable butter from Gabrielle Hamilton's Prune and used it in the Asparagus with Sable Butter from the same book. Topped with a fried egg. There was also toast, not pictured.

Below are the last 2 maple syrup bottles I've purchased from TJ's. They usually have a few options and I tend to pick the smaller sizes as I really don't use a ton. These are both Grade A, Dark Color, Robust Taste, the stuff that used to be Grade B. I noticed they also had a Maple-Agave blend, which I'd probably avoid. There's usually a quart size plastic jug, which is generally the best price per ounce, but since I don't use it often, I like to keep an eye on what's going on inside a glass bottle! The one on the left (from Canada) was a little lighter than the Vermont stuff but I found both acceptable. Growing up, we always bought from friends who had a sugarbush and made their own. Not an option here in SoCal 🙃