The 348th Reason I Wish I Owned A Food Processor

Hummus. It's delicious, healthy, a great accessory for pretzel chips - so I decided to make my own. It was good, a touch sweet from the sweet potatoes (it's shocking, right?) but mostly I just kept thinking about how good it might have been had I had a food processor. I love my Osterizer blender so much: 1970s face, old-school buttons ranging from "Grate" to "Liquefy" ... it's always got my back with soups and smoothies ... but sometimes you just need a food processor. Specifically, chickpeas need a food processor or in the midst of your delightful sweet potato spread you'll find little chickpeas, bobbing around like they don't give a fuck. Well, I give a fuck. And I'd like my sweet potato hummus to be all integrated, as God and Martha Stewart's editors intended.

Sweet Potato Hummus
Adapted from Power Foods.

2 smallish sweet potatoes
1 can (15 oz) chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1/4 cup tahini
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp cumin
1 lemon, juice of
salt
pepper

Set a pot of water to boil on the stove. Peel sweet potatoes and chop into 1-inch pieces. Add to boiling water and cook until tender, about 12 minutes. Drain and set aside or put into your food processor/blender. Add remaining ingredients to mixing device. Process until hummus consistency, adding up to 2 tbsp of water if you need to. Garnish with smoked paprika, if you like.

Notes

• Using less sweet potato will mellow out the sweet potato taste; if you're just looking for a straight-up hummus recipe, omit the sweet potatoes all together and use 2 cans of chickpeas.
• As with most savories I post, this is easily tailored to your palate. I used about 1/2 tbsp of salt in mine, but you may only need a pinch. The original recipe called for 1 clove of garlic but I love that shit so I tripled it. Etc. You should feel free to do the same.
• I looked like a fool in Whole Foods trying to find the tahini. If you've never bought/seen it before, they tend to keep it near the peanut butter.
• This was actually really good; the proportions of the recipe I listed above are appropriate (at least I think so) and even though mine tasted a little less like chickpeas than I would have liked, I'm convinced it's because I couldn't blend them properly into the rest of the mixture, not because of some failing in the recipe. But maybe I'm wrong. If you make this, please leave a comment and let me know how it turns out.

Cost

• Including the time it took to cook the sweet potatoes, you're looking at about a half hour for this adventure.
• If you consider an average size container of hummus to be 10 oz (information I quickly looked up on the Sabra website), this runs about $2.85/container. The tahini was the priciest part of this (at $5) but now I have enough of it to make this recipe 15 more times.