I love eating hummus on a piece of bread or a cracker. Just like that, or topped off with some sun-dried tomatoes or olives. I use it often as a replacement for cheese nowadays.
I try to eat less cheese as I found out that my skin isn’t too happy with me eating cheese. Sometimes even my stomach can’t handle cheese. It depends on the type of cheese that I eat, but I haven’t figured out precisely which cheeses are ok and which aren’t. I know for now that I can’t handle most of the cheap ‘cheeses’. Those are the pizza cheeses (especially in the US, where you can often find me hiding in the toilet *sorry*) and (cheaper) dutch cheeses. These really mess up my stomach and skin. So I try to stay away from them and eat less cheese overall to minimise exposure. And that’s where the hummus comes in.

In the Netherlands I just bought my hummus at the store. Here in France, I find it difficult to find tasty store bought hummus. In some stores I don’t like it because they add cream cheese to the mix. Really!? That really ruins it for me. In other cases the hummus is hidden somewhere at an unusual place that I have to search for an hour in between the 50.000 other products to find it. When I finally find it, they will just rearrange the shop and place the hummus at another place. Boo! But in general most of the hummuses here, are just not how I like hummus to taste. I even tried the health/bio/eco food stores and they all serve you a hummus that just isn’t what I want it to be.

And that’s why I make my own hummus nowadays. I experiment a lot with it, and use different ingredients every time I try. In general I try to use some kind of beans (or peas) and I also try to keep the tahin in. Everything else is optional actually. This time I tried to make one with avocado and it’s really delicious and creamy (without the earlier mentioned cream cheese!). This is how I made it:

avocado hummus chickpea

avocado hummusIngredients:

– 1 avocado
– 1 small can of soaked chickpeas
– 3 tbsp tahin paste
– handful of coriander leaves
– lemon juice of 1/2 lemon
– 3 tbsp (good) olive oil
– 1 clove of garlic
– salt & pepper to taste

Do:

Mix everything up in a blender or kitchen mixer.

Serve:

Serve it with some bread, crackers or raw veggies. Top with sun-dried tomatoes, black sesame or olives.

Preserve:

You can keep the hummus for several days in the refrigerator. I use Le Parfait jam jars with a plastic lid for preservation of these kind of homemade spreads. The good thing about France is that you can find these jars everywhere. If you don’t live in France, you could try and find them here.

homemade avocado hummus

I’ll share some of my other (nut) spread recipes in the upcoming months. Owh and please let me know if you have any secret hummus ingredient or recipe which you use. I would love to try that out as long as it’s not cream cheese. Hahaha.

avocado hummus recipe