Humus. . . or is it Hummus?

This post was prompted by a text from DS2 this morning, asking for my humus recipe.  I told him that humus took a long time to make, and since he was soon moving back from college for the summer, he probably did not have enough time to make it there.  Then I sent him another text, this one with the recipe I use for making hummus.  :0)  Apparently even just-finished 2nd year engineering students get the two mixed up.


Humus and hummus.  The words look a whole lot alike. If you don't pay much attention to phonetic clues, you might even pronounce them alike. They are, however, very different.  If you saw the two items, in real life, side by side, it would be easy to see they are not the same.

One is dirt.  The other, bean dip.  Definitely don't want one on your cracker, and the other probably won't grow your flowers or vegetables very well.

I make both.

Which brings to mind a time about twelve years ago, when I used to babysit DH's eldest nephew quite frequently.  He spent a summer being pretty much the fifth child at my house two or three days a week.  Being as he was a year older than my youngest, having him labeled "number five" was kind of odd.  Chronologically, he should have been number four, and DD2 should have been number five.  Yet, he wasn't quite the same as the other four kids, and at times stuck out like an extra thumb.

For my kids, seeing me throw kitchen scraps (veggie peels, carrot tops, etc) into the compost bin in the backyard was ho-hum, everyday life, nothing interesting going on here.

Yet for nephew, or "number five", it was a strange and curious thing indeed to see Aunt Kris bypass the trash can and take food scraps outside, then dump them into a pile and walk away.

Huh, what?  Which is pretty much what he said when he asked what I was doing.

So, I proceeded to tell a four year old about the compost pile--how it worked, what I did with it, and what the end product was.  He went home that day and announced with awe to his mother:  "Aunt Kris makes dirt!"

My "humus", aka dirt, recipe is pretty basic: take anything that decomposes, and toss it into a pile in the compost bins I have made out of old pallets.  Eventually, it will turn into dirt.  It, of course, works much faster if you layer your humus ingredients, making sure the carbonaceous ones cover the nitrogenous ones.  So, when you toss in poop (chicken, horse, rabbit, other livestock, not dog or cat), or grass clippings or weeds or food scraps, you want to make sure there's some wood chips, sawdust, straw, dead leaves, etc in there too.  Too much 'green stuff', green as in 'fresh' rather than dried like the sawdust, straw, etc, and you end up with a stinky slimy pile.  On the other hand, too much dried stuff and not enough green, and your pile doesn't heat up inside very much, and then it doesn't 'cook down' into the finished compost quite as fast.

There are books and tons of info on the internet about how to make compost, and if you want to be a compost perfectionist, you'll be better off following those than my method. But if you want to do it the slow and lazy way, just toss your pulled weeds, potato peelings, bunny manure, etc into a big heap and let nature take it's course.


Making hummus is much, much quicker.  You can do it the 'cheater' way and used canned beans, or you can do it the frugal way and use dried beans, which you then have to soak overnight and cook until soft.

Here's how I do it:

Put 1/2 cup garbanzo beans (aka chickpeas) into a small saucepan, cover with water until the water is about an inch above the beans.  Soak overnight.  The next day, add a bit more water if the beans have soaked it all up--they swell quite a bit, then bring to a boil, cover, and simmer about one hour, until you can mash a bean easily with a fork.  Drain the beans.

Now, if you are using the cheater method, buy a 15-ounce can of chickpeas/garbanzo beans from the store, and drain out the liquid in the can.

From here, you make it the same whether you are using cheater beans or frugal ones.

Put the beans in your blender (if you don't have a blender, put the beans in a medium size bowl and mash with a potato masher).

To the beans, add:
2-3 Tbsp olive oil (or veggie oil) 
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 cloves of garlic, peeled and chopped
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper

In the blender, puree all together.  You may need to add a little water if the bean mixture is too stiff and your blender is having difficulty.  If you are doing this by hand, you still might desire to add a little water to make stirring this mush easier.

When the mixture is the consistency you desire, you are done!  You now have hummus, to enjoy on crackers, pita breads, carrot sticks, whatever your heart desires.