Spreadelicious...Brought to you by From Scratch Weekends

Now that I am back on the island, Ryan and I were anxious to get back to our "from scratch weekends". This week we did something a little different.  Ryan had a real craving for some hummus, which in turn made me want some hummus too.  Now, they do sell hummus at the commissary, but we had made hummus before and it is so easy, so we decided to use this as part of our from scratch meal.

Which leads us to SPREAD-FEST 2010!

Here is the line up:

Starting with hummus...

Next up...baba ganoush (the modified version of this recipe)...

Finishing with the curried tuna salad...

Then we needed something to spread these on, so we went with pita...

Oh, and while we were at it, we opted for a nice salad, so I made this dressing too...

Starting with the hummus, which was the biggest priority.  We even made a double batch to last through the week.  I can't lie, I used tahini from a jar.  I just didn't have access to sesame seeds and the commissary now carries this, so we figure that you can only get so far down to from scratch, so we drew the line here and went with prepared tahini.  Please forgive me!  

This is so easy.  Everything goes in and then it gets mixed up.  We usually use the mini food prep, but with a double batch, I was concerned it would over flow, so instead we used...

the immersion blender, which worked really well.  I think the only difficulty was doing this in a square container because the mixture would get caught in the corners, and therefore did not get mixed all the way in.  No worries, we got it all.

We made the hummus on Saturday night, along with another goody (post coming soon!) and while doing that, it was margarita time.  This was to make up for the other night when the margarita seemed to have no alcohol in it and was basically a slushie.

Looks perfect!  These glasses are from our favorite Mexican restaurant in Las Vegas.  We have a pink glass and a blue glass.

Ok, Sunday morning we woke up and started on the eggplant which need to have some garlic slices shoved inside and then baked for about an hour.  Oh, I am not kidding about the garlic shoving.  You can see it here...

Poor thing looks like it got beat up by the garlic.  I can honestly say that baking this with garlic inside really made the house smell like garlic.

Oh yes, we have baked eggplant.  Now the recipe was for an eggplant dip, but there was a variation below this for baba ganoush, and we just had to have baba ganoush.

Scooped out and draining.

Since it was a single batch, it was much easier to use the mini food prep processor.

The key to altering the recipe was the addition of 2 ingredients...yogurt and cumin.  Now, there was no plain yogurt in the commissary, so I picked up the Greek yogurt instead, which we all know, is a great addition to recipes calling for yogurt.

Here it is with the cumin added.

Blended all together.  Here is our baba ganoush!

Then it was on to the tuna salad.  This we did a double batch of too.

One main change from regular old tuna salad, was the use of a granny smith apple in place of celery.  It was 1/2 apple for 6 ounces of tuna, in case you wanna give this a try.

Look at Ryan on the chopping action.

Perfect looking apple bits.

The other addition for this was the curry powder.  You can see there is also some black pepper in there.

Doesn't that look good?

Then we added the mayo and mixed it all up.

Next up was getting the salad prepared.  Actually, we really had the bread dough going in the machine for part of this time.  Either way, we have the salad being prepped here.

Kept it simple with just lettuce and tomato.

Since I had the tahini, I made a salad dressing using the tahini.  It also had soy sauce and honey, among other things.  The recipe is at the top of this post if you are interested.  I will say it was a little thick, but it tasted really good.

I even put it in my salad dressing mixer.  Again, really thick.  It couldn't be poured out without removing the top of this.

Finally, the bread.

Nice dough, but for some reason the pita dough is always sticky.  I like this recipe because it uses both bread flour and whole wheat flour.

Haha, doesn't it look like Mickey Mouse?

The thing about pita is that it puffs up in the oven.  That is how you get the pocket inside.  The oven MUST be super hot (500 degrees).

This one puffed up very nicely.

These only puffed up a little.  Either way, they still tasted great.

Ok, that was it for the cooking and prepping.  Here is the final spread before meal time.

Baba ganoush

Curried Tuna Salad

Hummus

The Salad

Pita bread with some fresh cut pineapple in the center.

Dinner is served...

Wow, was this a delicious, I mean spreadelicious, meal!  The flavors all worked really well together.  I am glad we have leftovers for this week.

QUESTIONS:  Have you ever made hummus or baba ganoush?  What is your favorite variation on classic tuna salad?