I had leftovers after we wolfed down the meatless tacos. And if you’ve been reading this blog, you will know that I HATE wasting food. I’d soaked and cooked up a batch of garbanzo beans for hummus and that container of lentils/quinoa/corn/tomatoes/olives/mushrooms looked kind mideastern. So I thought: Hummus Platter! I also had three Italian eggplants I’d been planning on using for eggplant parmesan. Instead, I preheated my oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit, sliced the eggplants in half, brushed each top with olive olive, sprinkled course salt and popped them in the oven for 20 minutes for Baba Ganoush, which, by the way, is my favorite food name. It takes me back to the days when I was a poor grad student at Columbia. We survived on $150 falafels from a place called Amy’s on Broadway and 113th St. Anyhoo…

First I cooked ups two cups of Israeli couscous in olive oil and vegetable broth with chopped onions and garlic and salt.

For the hummus I roughly followed Tamimi and Ottolenghi’s recipe in their cookbook Jerusalem, which I love. It calls for a generous amount of Tahini and lemon juice and some ice water. I add cumin, which I learned from my friend Sandra, whose mother is Moroccan. Plus salt and garlic and quite a bit of olive oil. All gets pureed together with the garbanzo beans in the Cuisinart until it is smooth and the right consistency.

For the baba ganoush, I scooped out the eggplant, and pureed it with olive oil, garlic and salt. Pretty simple.

I took my taco mix, put it in a pan and added my Villa Jerada Urfa Biber and Kefta Rub spices. Those are the ones I used to make Koubideh.

But you can’t have a hummus platter without pita so I turned to this recipe. They turned out more flat bread than pita, but they were delicious. I’ve made pita before in a really hot oven and they came out more pita. This recipe had me do it on the stove top on medium heat and that might have made the difference. Or it could be that I didn’t have the patience this time to role them out flat enough. No matter. Be warned though. Making flat bread/pita is super easy, but very time consuming. You have to make the initial dough, let it rise for two hours. Then you need to divide the dough into eight balls and let them sit half an hour. Then when it is time to cook them, you have to flatten/roll out each ball and heat them for about three minute each side. So you are talking six minutes a pita or 48 minutes for the batch. But they are worth it.

Finally, I had a cauliflower that needed to be eaten so I drizzled olive oil and salt onto the cauliflower heads and popped them into my oven. It all came out just like I remembered from a favorite Turkish cafe we used to go to when I did a sabbatical in Barcelona a while back.