Hummus, it's what's for dinner?

I love hummus! Roasted garlic or roasted red pepper are my favorite variations, but I really like any kind of hummus and pita bread (or veggies!) for snacking. I never considered using it as an entree (unless it's part of a "snacks for dinner" line up like I've done in the past), until I saw a recipe in an email from Epicurious (my main online source for recipe inspiration).  They posted a recipe for Hummus Dinner Bowls with Spiced Ground Beef and Tomatoes that sounded really interesting, so I thought I would give it a go, despite the extremely long recipe name.  LOL

It does call for making your own hummus, but if you use canned chick peas, it's really easy to do (and more economical than buying already-made hummus).  However, no one is going think less of you if you take a short cut, especially on busy nights when you need to get something on the table FAST! One more plug for making your own hummus, though: you can make it ahead of time if you know that you're going to be pressed for time the night you want to make this. You could also put together the tomato salad ahead of time, so that the only thing you have to do was cook the ground beef, then put the bowls together.

The salad is also pretty simple: tomatoes, lemon juice, parsley. It's a nice salad to have in your arsenal, especially if you have a lot of tomatoes from your garden to use up.





















All you do with the beef is brown it in a skillet with the spices:

Like I said, the hardest part, really, was browning the beef. The combination of spices was really tasty! And the whole family gobbled up every bite! The final product was very filling.

You wouldn't think that of something we generally think of as a snack food, but it was fun to kind of turn things upside down and look at a known food in a new way! If you are vegetarian, this could easily be adapted, substituting roasted vegetables for the ground beef.  If you're a cheese fan, I think throwing some feta on there would be tasty, too!

Here's the link to the recipe again, for Hummus Dinner Bowls. If you are inspired to make this, let me know what you think!

Tomato Time! Easiest Tomato Sauce Ever!

Hopefully some of you still have an abundance of cherry tomatoes in your garden. Unfortunately, I do not, although our tomato plants, after anemically growing all summer, seem to have gone crazy the last couple of weeks. I am hopeful that in the next week or two, we'll be up to our ears in tomatoes, which will go to tomato sandwiches, BLTs and sauce. However, for now, I still have to buy them. It's kind of sad, but this recipe for Burst Cherry Tomato Sauce is really good and very easy, so I am happy to buy a few pints of tomatoes just for this!

Epicurious, where I found the recipe, claims it's a 15-minute sauce, but it took my tomatoes longer to cook, and even then, not all of them burst. If you decide to take matters into your own hands (like me) and pop the "unburst" tomatoes with a paring knife, beware of squirting juices. Consider yourself warned! Even so, with the garlic and tomato prep, you can get this started after you put a pot of water on to boil for the pasta and still have dinner on the table in less than 30 minutes, so this is a great weeknight meal to have in your arsenal.

Along with the pasta and olive oil, this is pretty much all you need for this recipe! We still have basil, so that's the one thing from our garden...

There were some suggestions in the comments, and I liked the idea of putting the garlic in the oil at the same time you put the tomatoes in, otherwise the garlic might get too brown (or even burnt). Doing it this way, the garlic still flavors the oil, but the risk of burning is less. From this picture, you can see the pasta simmering away in the background. 

I chopped up the basil while the sauce was cooking and tossed it in right at the end, just to incorporate everything before I put it on top of the noodles. And, following up on my theme last week of satisfying different palates, you could serve up some of the pasta plain (or with butter and cheese as my youngest loved when he was a todder, serving raw cherry tomatoes on the side if your child has an aversion to cooked veggies), or top the pasta just with the tomatoes, and then add the basil to the rest of the sauce for everyone else. See how easy that is? And you don't even have to dirty extra pans!

Finished product! If you are gluten free or doing Whole 30, I'm sure this would be delicious with zucchini noodles as well!