Quick & Easy toasted pine nut hummus

We've been so busy in my house lately that I've been digging up my easiest possible recipes to get us through the days! One healthy snack I try to keep around is hummus; it's full of protein, low on fat, and can be eaten with whole wheat crackers, veggie slices (healthy and gluten-free!), spread on pizza, or used as a filling in sandwiches and wraps. It's fairly expensive if you buy pre-made hummus from the grocery store, but it's very cheap to make it yourself! All you need is cooked chickpeas (aka garbanzo beans), which cost around $1 in the can (or you can buy them dry and cook them yourself to save even more), and a few pantry staples.

For roasted pine nut hummus, my ingredients are:

1 can chickpeas (I recommend no salt added)

juice of half a lemon

2-3 TBSP olive oil

sesame oil (or tahini, but I always have oil on hand and it's the same flavor)

~1TBSP toasted pine nuts, plus more for garnish

garlic, 2-3 small cloves

optional: salt (we cook low sodium so I don't add any)

If your pine nuts are raw, you can roast them in a dry pan over medium-low heat until they're starting to toast and your house smells amazing. A little goes a long way in flavoring hummus, so I toasted up a good 1/4 cup at once but only used a tablespoon or two in the recipe.

Once your pine nuts are toasted, dump your drained chickpeas, garlic, lemon juice, and oils into your blender or food processor (or right into your serving dish if you're using an immersion blender like me), and blend together until you have smooth, creamy hummus!

Taste it once it's blended fully to see if it needs more of anything..I usually add a few tablespoons of water so it's not too thick and dry, but other brands of chickpeas may be different. If you're adding salt, now would be the time to adjust that, too. Garnish with a little extra olive oil and a few pine nuts on top and you're ready for a healthy snack! This will keep in the fridge for over a week, but ours hardly ever lasts that long.

 We also love roasted red pepper hummus (same process, just add canned roasted red pepper instead of pine nuts!), but the flavors are neutral enough to work with just about anything! Enjoy!

-Yellow