Home Again Home Again ...

 I'm back on the patio in the dark.  Thankfully there are no bears to worry about here and no long walk in the dark to the outhouse.  It's nice and cool for the time being, but that won't last long.  It appears 106 is on the schedule for the next four days.  OUCH!!!

I guess I should have been working hard at putting stuff away the last two days instead of hanging out on the couch.  As you can see, I couldn't get up .... nailed to the cushion by this little guy who has my heart.  You just can't move when they are sleeping so soundly.

When he finally woke up and the latest rodeo ended on TV, I got the brilliant idea I would make some hummus.  Where the heck did THAT come from?  Sometimes when you are in the mountains, if you are lucky, a chef will pack something great for your eating pleasure.

Sandy's husband is a pretty darn good chef (not really, he works for the School District) and an inventor of the most amazing things.  She shared with me some of the best hummus I've eaten, made by the same hands that took a tarp and sewed it into a hay bag.  

So why not try it myself?  I should have resisted the urge.  First, you have to open a huge can of garbanzo beans and squeeze the little buggers one at a time to take the skins off.  After the first ten went flying out onto the floor, I was having second thoughts.  

Then there was the tahini ... ground sesame seeds, including the oil ... that I ordered from the internet.  You can't just buy the 1/3 cup required ... I'm now the proud owner of 32 ounces.  As for the piñon nuts ..... there's a story behind my love of those.

Way back in the days of the dinosaurs, BEFORE the dam was built and our ranch flooded, our entire family would go up into the mountains for pinion picking and a picnic.  They were pretty proliferous among the pine trees.  The nuts come from the pine cones that fall to the ground.  Naturally they are covered with pitch, making them ever so fun to extract.  

We gathered the cones while my dad whacked them with sticks until the nuts came out.  Those that refused to move were tediously picked out by hand by us kids of course.

They come with a very hard shell.  To remove it, the nuts are roasted over a fire, then cracked to expose the wonderful weird tasting nut.  Since there are no trees around here, I again had to hit the internet.  As you know, there's only a picture ... so how do you know which ones to get?  You don't ... and at $2.00 an ounce, you don't want any mistakes.  The ones I got were not the right ones.  Too small and no flavor.

SO ... into the food processor went the garbanzo beans, tahini that had to be stirred about 15 minutes before getting to the right consistency, garlic (WRONG - DON'T PUT IN GARLIC), pine nuts and a little salt.  Add to that cold water as it is processing and you have HUMMUS.  

Let me just say it tasted like crap!!!  It looked nice, but the taste wasn't there.  Probably not enough pine nuts.  Maybe it will taste better after sitting in the fridge overnight.  Yes, there's supposed to be olive oil topping the hummus in my picture, but I'm not a fan of oil.  As you can see, I scraped off most of the piñon nut topping and ate those first.  STILL no flavor.  I guess I'll try tasting it again tomorrow.  In the meantime, I have some tahini for sale .... CHEAP!!!

Here's the latest update on the quilt.  Just when I thought I was almost finished, I discovered I had 22 MORE ribbon sashings to sew before sewing the triangles around the outside.  Big sigh!!!!!

It will be a miracle if I ever finish this thing.  In the meantime, I'm girding my loins for one last BINGO meeting before I head on out to the monsoon flooding in Arizona in week.  In case you haven't heard, Las Vegas is having floods, as did Death Valley.  Apparently it's an epic monsoon season in the desert.