Pita is messy! Pita is good.

John got all excited about new immersion blender and the ability to make hummus at any time. This led strangely enough to lots of hummus and hummus-oriented business.

Hummus with an immersion blender

chickpeas out of a can
tahini
lemon juice
paprika
three cloves of garlic
olive oil
salt

Drain the chickpeas and put them in an appropriate container for super puree mixing. Whack several big spoonfuls of tahini in there. Cut a lemon in half and squeeze one of them into the mix. Watch out for seeds. Smash the garlic with the flat of a knife, peel off the skin, and add it too. Then glug in some olive oil and a couple shakes of paprika and salt.

MIX!

John was especially excited about the new little food-processory attachment for said immersion blender, so we used that. It worked admirably.

Scrape down sides if necessary and mix some more. Get it to the texture you want. Also get it to the taste you want. This can be done by tasting said hummus and considering what might be missing. In our case, we needed more tahini and lemon juice. After we added them, everything was fine.

Our batch turned out particularly orange, because we like paprika.

Things to do with hummus:

* Dip everything into the land in it: pita, carrots, bell pepper, celery, blanched green beans, whatever.
* Thin it and use it as a glaze for big mushroom or eggplant steaks.
* Make tasty sammiches with it.

Our tasty sammiches:

pita bread
hummus
a leftover crumbled lentil-brown rice burger
lots of watercress/other greens

Split pita. It will not work very well unless you've just baked it, so take that into consideration. Maybe you want to roll it up instead.

Spread insides of pita with hummus, then add whatever bits and pieces you think sound delicious. We wanted crispy lentil bits, so that's what we added. Also watercress, because watercress is good. Any other greens would clearly be fine here too.

Other tasty things to put in sammich with hummus:
* any appropriate raw vegetables you can think of: red pepper, shredded carrot, sprouty business.
* roasted or marinated vegetables such as olives, roasted pepper, any vegetable cooked on the grill (blackened green beans or asparagus!)
* baked or fried slices of eggplant, zucchini, or giant mushroom. Bread them or don't bread them.
* other salady things such as tabbouleh, baba ghanouj, raita, or fattoush.

Oh my god, I am so hungry. It's a good thing we have half the batch left in the refrigerator.