7. Hummus and Pita Chips

I learned more about Mediterranean cuisine after I became a vegetarian.  I ate a "lacto-ovo vegetarian" diet for twenty years, from the ages of 15 to 35, before I returned to an omnivorous diet.  Lacto-ovo means the only animal products I would eat were eggs and milk, but not flesh, not even chicken or fish.   My motto was, if it took a shit, I won't eat it.  I could pick from plenty of reasons why I was such an angry teenager so I won't go into that too much.  When I discovered punk rock it really spoke to me, especially the tunes of violence, nihilism, and those rife with swear words.   After a few years I discovered the political side to punk rock and how offensive it was to the authorities that I hated so much.  I didn't realize the mere mention of anarchy and vegetarianism could strike dread and fear into so many people, especially during the square-ass Reagan years.  By the time I was fifteen I had been a self-declared atheist of six years and now my new way of annoying the squares was becoming a vegetarian.  I didn't do it for health reasons but the sheer purpose of making people feel guilty about eating animals.  Sure I was full of a lot of contradictory cliches and poorly stated arguments.  But I wasn't looking to win arguments with reason, but emotion.  If I pissed you off, I won.  The world pissed me off and I wanted to feed it its own medicine.

At first, I lost a lot of weight, but it may not have been strictly due to my change in diet.  At the time my mom only had 20 bucks a week to feed three kids and herself.  So there wasn't a lot of soda and junk food around.  There was a lot of stuff for grilled cheese sandwiches, and some of our neighbors gave us veggies from their gardens.  So I ate a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato, fried zucchini, and drank plenty of tap water the summer I became a  vegetarian.  My mom hated that I was a vegetarian because it played hell with her 1950s and 60s mentality.  But I probably saved her a lot of money in those times.  Vegetarians are a dime a dozen today but it was almost unheard of in the 80s and boy did the normies hate it.  It was actually dangerous.  At high school bullies used to try to force feed me meat, some broke into my locker and put meat in it, and sometimes people just threw the stuff at me from their cars.  This really was what it was like to be a punk rocker in a backward town like Toledo back then.  I guess a part of me enjoyed it.  It justified my hatred of the world. 

After a while, my mom found a job and started making more money.  Well, we always had a lot of sodapop and potato chips around the house and that didn't have any meat in it so I ate a lot of shit like that and gained weight again.  Being a vegetarian is no guarantee of being healthy or thin, I know first hand.  Flash forward twenty years I was still a vegetarian because it was a habit by then more than anything.  The morality of it all wasn't very strong with me in the first place and the shock value wore off.  However, when I slid into a mental breakdown after my divorce my life started falling apart and the more I became dependent on the kindness of others.  My bottom at the time was sleeping in the kitchen of an efficiency apartment that housed three other people.  My head lay at the entrance door and the bathroom door was at my feet.  Most of the food I ate people gave to me, that was when I decided I shouldn't be choosy about what food people give me.  Actually when I re-introduced meat into my diet I ended up getting a lot of food.  People just piled it on and the fridge was always full of stuff.

Although I've reverted back to an omnivorous diet, I haven't become a typical meat and potatoes asshole.  I started trying meat that I never had in my life like frog, squid, octopus, eel, alligator, venison, elk, etc., and  I certainly haven't stopped eating the food I ate when I was a vegetarian and now a lot of its helping me in the recovery of my health.  However, I doubt I'll ever become a vegetarian again.  The politics and philosophy of it  are pretty much like all politics and philosophy, just a load of bullshit that doesn't solve anything.

HUMMUS AND PITA CHIPS

When it comes to snacking I'm more of a salt and crunchy type than a sweet tooth.  However, my big weakness with sweets is soda pop and the snacking indulgence is salty and crunchy which can really be unhealthy and fattening.  However, baked pita chips and hummus are pretty healthy for snacking and not too hard to make.  

Ingredients for Pita Chips
1 package of pita bread
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 tablespoon of garlic powder
1 teaspoon of kosher salt
1 teaspoon of garlic salt


Oil your pita loaves

Place a whole pita loaf on a cutting board or very clean surface.  put your olive oil in a bowl and dip a barbecue brush into the oil and brush a coat onto the pita loaf.  

A pita pocked covered with olive oil.

spices

 What you really want to do with the spices is try to find the easiest way to distribute them evenly across the tops of oiled pita bread loaves.  In fact you may want to disregard the measurements and sprinkling  the spices separately and eyeball the amounts, this should work.  I've also tried putting them together in a salt shaker and shaking them on the loaf.

The holes are too small for this to work well, If you want to try this I recommend a shaker more like the ones that distribute Parmesan cheese or red pepper flakes.

I even tried mixing some with the oil.  I recommend trying any way you can think of to suit your taste I found I had to put a decent amount on mine to taste it.  You don't want to be too light with it tough.  

I shot the sheet pan with cooking spray, cut the loaves into 8 pieces (They come out the size and shape of Doritos with the small loaves.) and laid them in this arrangement.

Baking
If you want the chips good and crispy put them into an over preheated at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about ten minutes.  You may need a few minutes more or less depending on how crispy you want them.

After ten minutes in the oven, I take them off the sheet with a spatula and place them on a baking grate thing over another cookie sheet.  According to the great Alton Brown, this is supposed to work better than draining on paper towels.

This bowl has a lid and makes for great pita chip storage.

  Hummus
Premade hummus you get in 8 oz tubs at the supermarket are nice and tasty, but they're a fucking ripoff compared to how much you can make at home for the same price.  It may be a little work, but if you love hummus as much as every hummus fan I know loves hummus, then it's worth it because you get so much bang for your buck!
 
INGREDIENTS
1 can of chick peas (garbanzo beans)  
4 tablespoons of lemon juice
2 tablespoons of tahini
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon kosher salt
olive oil
black pepper to taste

Drain and rinse your chick peas.  This will reduce the sodium from the can.  Place into a food processor or blender.  Personally I have found a blender works best for smooth consistency like creamy peanut butter.  Add the lemon juice and tahini.  I found tahini in the refrigerated Mediterranean food  section with the pre-made hummus and with the olives in the dry aisle, go figure.  This stuff is easy to find if you know what you're looking for.  It's a beige paste-like substance in a jar.  
Add the garlic, salt, and a a drizzle of olive oil.  Add a little bit of water, then give it a good shot with your pepper grinder.  Now start the machine.

This is my roomies' 3 year old.  She loves running the food processor.  Is it safe?  I don't care, it's not my kid, just kidding.

This is the roomies' six year old.  He helps with some other things in the kitchen and isn't too bad with the camera.

 

The food processor takes a while to get that really creamy consistency so it's nice to have some help.

  You want to check the hummus periodically.  Get out a tasting spoon and give it a try.  It should be a little tart from the lemon juice, if not add more.  If it still seems too chunky try adding a little more water, but be careful not to thin it out too much.  A little more tahini or olive oil may make it creamy but not as thin.  This dish is real flexible, so I recommend experiementing with the recipe and adding new flavors.  It can be eaten right away but tastes better marinaded in the fridge for a few hours.

This much hummus cost less than two bucks to make.  It'd probably be about six bucks or more at the supermarket.

 

Millions of Dead Cops were one of the leading punk rock bands to promote vegetarianism in the punk scene and with a name like that they weren't too shy about pissing people off.  I met them when they played in Toledo back in 1986, real nice guys actually.