A hummus fail...

...with a happy ending nonetheless

Hello dear readers,

If you’ve been reading along these last couple weeks, you know that Tom and I have been trying out a new system of organising the various chores in our lives called Fair Play. As I wrote last week, we got off to a strong start, managing to reduce some of the mental load around planning meals and doing laundry in particular. We seemed to be on a similar track this week until Wednesday, when things took a turn for the worst.

One of the fundamental concepts in Fair Play is that the Conception, Planning and Execution of a task (“CPE” for short) is owned by the same person. Splittling off one of those parts will lead to what Eve Rodsky calls a “CPE Fail”. Well, fail we did, and magnificently at that.

I have to take you back to Saturday to explain the root cause of this system failure. Feeling energised and motivated after lunch that day, I suggested I make a batch of hummus on Sunday evening—and when I say “make a batch”, I mean a large batch. We make hummus from scratch using dried chickpeas and the process takes the better part of an afternoon if you don’t count the overnight soaking of the beans.

By the time Saturday evening rolled around and I should have been getting the beans ready to soak, I had changed my mind. I didn’t feel like making hummus anymore. I had already suggested I take on most of the CPE around our plant-based Thanksgiving (Plants-giving??) meal the following week so the thought of making hummus on top of that suddenly felt like a lot.

This put us in a difficult situation. Tom was in charge of lunches and dinner Monday through Wednesday, and at least a couple of those meals were relying on leftover hummus. I felt guilty that it was now Tom’s job to make the hummus that I didn’t feel like making so I offered to do parts of it, like the tahini sauce. Had I stopped right there we might have avoided the disaster that ensued. But no, after making the tahini sauce I thought I “might as well” prep the rest of the recipe so that all that was left for Tom to do was drain the chickpeas and add them to the ingredients I had already measured out and put into a pot. Except he didn’t notice that I had already added salt and baking soda to the mix, so he added in some more.

The end result was a batch of hummus with twice as much salt and baking soda as usual. God, it was awful! I felt terrible. Hummus is one of my favourite meals. A bowl of hummus topped with spinach (or mushrooms or caramelized onions or fried potatoes) with some hot pita bread on the side always (always!) puts a smile on my face. And perhaps the worst part of this story is that we only realised the mistake after sitting down to eat. There I was, freshly showered after a short indoor workout, looking forward to that first mouthful of rich and creamy goodness. I was distraught.

Hummus from a previous batch

Fortunately, we had some leftovers and freshly baked bread around so we didn’t go hungry. And the following day, Tom—the hero of this story—popped to the nearest Turkish supermarket to get some extra tahini and canned chickpeas which he then blended into the leftover hummus with a bit of lemon juice. And voilà! Hummus saved. And now we have even more hummus than usual. 😁 “How much?” you wonder. Oh, just 3 kilos worth. And that’s after having hummus for dinner last night! But I’ve just googled whether you can freeze hummus and apparently you can—so unless we can offload some on friends, that’s probably what we’ll do.

Take care,

Alicia

PS. This is the recipe we follow: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/03/israeli-style-extra-smooth-hummus-recipe.html