Hummus

I made this along with homemade pita, which I'll post separately. I'm slowly becoming obsessed with breadmaking, probably because I swear by the Atkins diet. Anyway, here is the recipe for hummus, adapted from Epicurious. Well, to be fair, the recipe was nearly perfect. So it's barely adapted. My comments are in italics...

What's in it:

• 2 cups drained well-cooked or canned chickpeas, liquid reserved. LIQUID RESERVED!!!! RESERVE THE LIQUID!!!! It's easy to miss this and dump all this delectable chickpea flavored water down the sink...why would you need this, after all? But you do, because your hummus will be thick and chunky without it. If you didn't pay attention to this extremely obvious notation, you can use water, but the liquid reserve has more flavor.
• 1/2 cup tahini (sesame paste), optional, with some of its oil. Not optional, tahini is a must for hummus, I'm not sure what kind of crack the author was on. In our grocery store, tahini was by the olives. It tastes a lot like natural peanut butter. I plan to try making a peanut butter hummus, since peanut butter is significantly cheaper than tahini.
• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus oil for drizzling
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled, or to taste. I actually put in 3, but I'm a garlic fiend.
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin or paprika, or to taste, plus a sprinkling for garnish
• Juice of 1 lemon, plus more as needed. I put in more. Lemony hummus has a nice fresh flavor. I also didn't use a fresh lemon, because I'm too lazy to juice. I'm sure it's better with fresh lemon juice, but the stuff in the squeezy bottle worked fine, in my opinion.
• Chopped fresh parsley leaves for garnish. I rarely feel like buying parsley, so I didn't. I can't swear it wouldn't be better with parsley, but it's great without it.

How to make it:

This is the simplest thing ever. It all goes in the food processor. Except for the parsley, according to the recipe, which, as I mentioned above, I ditched anyway. Anyway, pulse everything until it starts to get smooth, and slowly add the reserved chickpea liquid (or water, if you forgot to reserve the chickpea liquid) through the cool entry tube in the top of the processor until the hummus is the right consistency. By which I mean, the consistency of hummus. If you are at a loss, go to a middle eastern restaurant.

Taste. Add stuff. Taste again. It's amazing how precise I feel I need to be with the flavors when I get to taste it after each adjustment. It never quite gets perfect...until it's all gone.