ROASTED BEETROOT HUMMUS

A beautiful bowl of sweet caramelised roasted beetroot and chic pea hummus, I just love hummus and I find that there is something very comforting in scooping this up with a fresh warm flat bread and enjoying every mouthful, this is one snack that there is never any leftovers for later...

Wonderfully quick and simple to make, really just a assembly and blitzing of the ingredients.  I have used heritage pink and white striped beets that I grew this year and that has resulted in a lighter pink hummus.

Cooking time: 45 minutes / Prep time: 5 minutes

Ingredients

(makes 280g)

2 beetroots oven roasted

1 tsp olive oil

1 tin organic chic peas

3 cloves garlic

1 red chilli

1/2 juice and zest lemon

60-100ml olive oil

1 pinch sea salt

2 tbsp tahini

(recipe to make your own below)

Method

1.  First pre heat your oven to 200 C / 410 F toss the beetroots in the olive oil and place them in the oven to roast for around 40 minutes, remove and leave to cool for five minutes, then peel the skins off by hand, the beets peel better when still warm.

 2.     Place all the ingredients except the olive oil in your food blender and blitz and pulse away until you have a smooth consistency then drizzle in half the olive oil and pulse some more, season with salt and taste, at this point your hummus is ready, but you might like a looser consistency and if you do add the rest of the olive oil.

TO MAKE YOUR OWN TAHINI
Ingredients
(makes 6 tbsp)
70g sesame seeds
3-4 tbsp grape seed oil
1 pinch of salt

This only takes a minute to make, heat a non stick pan to a medium heat and lightly toast the sesame seeds for a minute or so, keep the seeds moving so as not to burn, which would give your tahini a bitter taste, remove and place in your blender, blitz to a powder.
Drizzle in the grape seed oil and season with the salt and that's it.. I used grape seed oil as it has a neutral base flavour that won't distract from the sesame flavour.