The Cocoanut

I love eating those old school Mediterranean dips, hummus, baba ghanouj, tzatziki, with dry, rye crispbreads. Some people enjoy them with raw carrot or celery matchsticks, due to personal taste or purely for health benefits, but I find the individual flavours of the veggies quite distracting. In order to fully appreciate the nuttiness of hummus or the velvety, roast eggplant smokiness of baba ghanouj, the nondescript neutrality offered by bread, or crispbread, is best.

I’m not sure if it’s inflation or agflation, the current phenomenon of sharply rising food prices, but dips at the supermarket these days are really expensive (or am I just poorer?)

In any case, I won’t allow my addiction to dips to bring me to the brink of financial insolvency, so I’ve resorted to making them at home instead. Dips from pulses like chickpeas, lentils and broad beans are very convenient to make, as you could just buy them already tinned. Of course, you could also soak them overnight and cook them for a further 2 hours, but that would kinda cancel out the Convenience factor.

Essentially, dips are a combination of 3 things, the body, which consists of the main ingredient; seasoning like salt, spices or herbs; and fats like oil and tahini (sesame paste), which flavours and loosens the dip. In the hummus recipe below, I’ve excluded tahini simply because I don’t have it at home, but the result is no less tasty.

Hummus in a jiffy
Serves 4 or 1 if you’re me

1x 400g tinned chickpeas, drained, washed, and loose skins discarded if you can be bothered (I hate the skins, so I don’t mind the extra effort)
½ tsp ground cumin, chili powder
1 clove garlic, crushed
juice of 1 lemon
olive oil
salt

Mash the chickpeas thoroughly, add the seasonings according to taste, then finish it off with a few lugs of olive oil and stir until you get a consistent paste. In one version I added 2 tsp of mayo just to experiment, and I found the dip had a more consistent texture, although I’m not sure if the same result could be achieved simply by adding more olive oil!

Spicy Lentil dip,also in a jiffy

1x 400g tinned lentils, drained and washed
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
a small piece of ginger, about 1 cm, grated or finely chopped
½ tsp ground turmeric
1 tsp ground cumin, ground coriander
1 tablespoon tomato paste

Heat some oil in a frying pan, and sauté the onion, garlic and ginger until the onion is soft. Add the turmeric, cumin, coriander and lentils and cook, stirring, until fragrant. Add the tomato paste and continue stirring. Take off the heat, and mash the whole thing until it becomes a paste. Add some olive oil to loosen, and season with salt and pepper if need be.