True Food Co-op: healthy salad recipes - houmous

This morning I took over as tutor for the Reading True Food Co-op's healthy cooking course ... the members of my class are all young mums with babies in the creche round the corner, and toddlers at playgroup down the road. We made salads: houmous, Waldorf salad, tuna and white bean salad, and a couscous salad. Pretty standard stuff, you might think - I certainly did until mid-morning when I discovered that none of my students had ever heard of houmous, let alone tasted it, and three of them had never tasted celery before. The great thing was that they all liked both.

Here's the houmous recipe we used - it's got less tahini than my usual mix, so it's a good one to start with.

Houmous

400g can chickpeas
3 cloves garlic
2 tbsp tahini paste
3 tbsp olive oil
1 lemon
2 tbsp water

Squeeze the juice (pick out the pips). Put everything together in a processor and blend until smooth.

We garnished ours with a little paprika, as thinking about presentation is a feature of the course.


The photograph shows the view from my kitchen window when I came downstairs and drew the curtains open this morning.