A very quick and easy Hummus

Food time again!

I am in Jalandhar, and Minnie’s mom had boiled some cholle, for a typical punjabi dinner... I thought about feeding our hard core punjabi friends here, some hard core lebanese food!
You guessed it, i made Hummus, and remembered to take the attached photo too :)
Its so very simple to make and tastes so completely different from Cholle, i guarantee you will have people simply not believing the taste of what they are eating!

Here goes:

You will need:

1 Kg Cholle (Chick Peas)
1 full generous cup of Olive Oil
Juice from 2 limbus (Lemons)
3 Pods of garlic
1 Tomato finely chopped
1 small bunch of coriander leaves finely chopped
few black olives thinly sliced
Salt to taste
a sprinkling of red chilly powder

Get about 1 Kg of Cholle (Chick peas) and boil them till nice and soft, adding just a spoon of olive oil and salt to taste. You can even pressure cook them.

Crush or finely chop 3 cloves of garlic and fry till golden brown in olive oil.

In a blender, add the boiled cholle, the garlic and the olive oil, and just half a glass of water. To this add the juice of 2 lemons (limbu) and about 1/4th cup of Olive oil as well. Blend to a smooth paste. You may add some more water to make the mixture thick and of dropping consistency. It should plop into the bowl, remember to keep it thick, don’t ruin it by adding too much liquid and making it too thin and watery. Be miserly with the water :)

Empty the entire mixture into a glass serving bowl (any bowl will do, glass just makes it look really nice). Add another 1/2 cup of olive oil to the mixture and mix it up really well. Smoothen the surface with a ladle. Make some circles on the surface with your finger, Sprinkle some red chilly powder into the circles. This is just decoration, dont be liberal. Add about 2 table spoons of olive oil to the surface. Add some very finely chopped tomato and coriander to the surface. And if you want to be proper about it, some thinly sliced black olives.

Serve with hot roti, or pita bread or toasted multi grain bread. Hummus can also be chilled, though i like it warm...

The recipe takes far longer to write about and read than actually make. Its really quick, once you have the cholle boiled, it takes less than 10 minutes to whip this up... Serves more than 8 hungry people as a start up to dinner. We had a thick and hearty carrot and broccoli soup for dinner after this and it was most filling and satisfying!

I remembered to take a photo too with bansal's brand new Canon Rebel XTI camera... enjoy :)
(umm... reduced the image size drastically, so please dont blame the camera for the resolution, i am on dial up here!)

For the record, no one could imagine that cholle could be made to taste like this! :)