Humous, houmous...?

"Food" is an odd word isn't it? Food, food, foooooood (say it a few times and you'll see what I mean) an "oo" sandwiched between the woolly consonants "f" and "d".  The word comes from the Old English foda, says the Online Etymology Dictionary (yes, that is what I do in my spare time, do you have a problem with that?) but that in itself comes from an old Germanic verb meaning "to feed": fodjan.  The word has still older roots in Greek and Latin as one might imagine from such a mongrel of a language as English; it is believed to have evolved from the stem of the Greek "pateisthai" and Latin "pastor", commonly understood to mean shepherd, but originally in fact "feeder".   Apparently words beginning in "P" in Latin often ended up as "F" in German, for reasons obscure to me until I get enough time to read deeper.

But why am I telling you this right? Well apart from the fact that words and their evolution is constantly fascinating to me and that I think it's sad that people don't care where their words come from, this post is about food.  Yes, I admit that that doesn't exactly explain the etymology lesson, but if you factor in the fact that my mind has a tendency to wander, it makes perfect sense.

Oddly enough I'm having difficulty thinking what food the word "food" would be if it were food! The idea is slightly too self referential for my sleep deprived head to contemplate, so I will have to save that for later.

But on with the recipe! Hummous(?) is one of my favourite foods, I probably eat it everyday, and what could be better than a delicious food? Why, a delicious food that you made yourself of course. So if, like me, you like hummus (how do you spell the damn thing?!) here's how you can make it.

Ingredients:

• Chickpeas                              240g (drained)
• Tahini (sesame seed paste)     1 tsp
• Olive oil                                  1 tbsp
• Lemon                                    juice of 1/2 to 1
• Garlic                                     1 clove
• Salt                                        to taste
• Pepper                                    to taste
• Paprika                                   sprinkle (optional)

Method:

• Drain the chickpeas and blend to a paste
• Finely chop the garlic 
• Squeeze the lemon
• Mix the chickpea paste, olive oil, tahini and garlic together in a mixing bowl.
• Add the juice from 1/2 the lemon
• Taste your humous so far and add salt and pepper and more lemon juice to your preference (personally I would add a few generous pinches of salt and the rest of the lemon juice or it tastes a little bland)
• Add around 100ml of water for a slightly thinner consistency (unless you really like it thick of course)

• Scrape into a bowl with a lid and sprinkle over a pinch of paprika for appearance and adorn with a sprig of basil, parsley or dill (lots of herbs go with humous)

It looks and tastes great and it is so quick!

I couldn't find any of the aforementioned herbs, so that is kale on the top, but you get the idea!

Autumn

I think autumn is my favourite time of year, along with spring - everything is in-between one thing and another, the leaves are turning, making everywhere golden and pink.  Taking photos in autumn is great because the colours are so vibrant and warm and the sun is often quite low so that it shines through everything.

I have nothing much more to say, I just wanted to share some photos!

Yay! you looked through all the photos! (or just scrolled down to the comments, but yay anyway)

Another great thing about autumn and all these lovely leaves is another excuse to get our my flower press and press some, um, leaves - hmm, from now on I'm just calling it The Press - I think it deserves the capitals. ;)

Grape Daze

What felt like a brief, blitheringly hot end to summer was apparently enough to produce a huge amount of grapes, and I mean an huge amount, on a small vine in my grandparent's garden.  They weren't entirely ripe however, and we spent a couple of days agonising about whether to pick them or not, but when it started raining we decided to give in and pick the lot before they went to the bad...

bucket full'a grapes

But what to do with such a large quantity of on average slightly under ripe grapes I hear you cry, and the answer is of course, to squash them!  We're making wine.

So, let the squishing begin!
But first the tedious sorting through of the grapes. yay. So we spent what felt like several hours removing the "unsound" grapes from the rest (unsound being the word they use in the wine making book we used)

And with the tedious sorting came what I am going to refer to as The Grape Daze - capital T, G and D.  After a while sorting through these grapes my mind was starting to, shall be say, search around for distraction in just about any form

1) bug containment

Strictly speaking this wasn't my mind wandering, it was just me being generally unwilling to see silly little insects turned into wine, so we a big bucket for unsound grapes and into this bucket also went several earwigs, a multitude of spiders, slugs and about a million snails.  And these snails are little tiny baby snails so it is quite easy to, in ones valiant attempts to rescue said stupidly small snails, squash them instead.  Which is why we lost several good grapes to the cause - it turns out it's easier just to pick of the grape that the snail is on. Something worth remembering I think.

2) a fixation over the word "inverted"

Now don't ask me how this got started, but after a while I couldn't get the word out of my head. Inverted, inverted, in-vert-ed. INVERTED. I started wondering whether you could vert something.  I feel an example is necessary...

Imagine, you are walking along (stick with me here) you see a beetle (or a tortoise if you prefer).  The beetle (or tortoise) is on the ground in front of you, on it's back - it's little legs are flailing and it looks as mournful as a maggot just lying there on it's back.  So being a generally nice person that doesn't like to see others suffering for no reason you vert it. Putting it back the right way up, it waddles away happily to it's beetle (or tortoise) family.  Hooray verting saves the day.

ehem, or something like that - unfortunately I looked it up, and vert is not a verb - but it should be, just like the singular of sheep should in fact be shoop.

I think this whole thing may have been a by-product of the bug rescuing.

 



3) Graphs

I started to mentally makes graphs of what we were doing and how long it took to do it. No joke.  I think this is some kind of sign that I've been doing to much statistics.  Or maybe it's just my mind being strange at a time of intense tedium.  I don't know.

I've drawn out some of them for some reason - here you go, mock me if you dare! ;)










4) The pomegranate seed

This was perhaps the most bizarre of all, and it occurred towards the end of the squashing process itself. I had, earlier on in the day been eating a pomegranate, (fascinating right?) and my dad found a seed on the worktop, so he squeezed it into out increasingly full vat of grape juice.   Not too strange so far, but then came this strange little scene, where in the future we're world famous wine makers and people are begging us for the secret, and it's that in every bottle there is the juice of one single pomegranate seed.  It was a bit of a Black Books everyone-said-I-was-mad-moment.  (I can't find a clip on youtube so if you don't know what I'm talking about you're going to have to watch Black Books, Grapes of Wrath episode or forever be tormented with not understanding my little story)

Any way, the product of this strange afternoon were four rather disconcertingly brown coloured gallon bottles of grape juice. I am assured the brown will settle, otherwise we have jsut made pure liquid brown (as opposed to pure green) and this is going to be the most unappetisingly coloured wine ever made.