Clare Teal: Why life is like a bowl of hummus

Mud fancied a bit of hummus too, so every time I dunked a carrot stick, I dunked another for her.

After a while Jason who had been observing from the back seat commented that curiously the sticks I was personally eating were loaded with considerably more hummus than those Mud was eating.

Was I aware of this imbalance in the hummus to carrot ratio? Well no I wasn’t as every baton was selected at random and dipped with the same swooping action. I put said imbalance down to the fact that in Mud’s case I swooped with my right hand, perhaps me being left handed is what contributed to this unfair advantage but hey that’s the hummus lottery.

It reminded me of the time our hero and myself decided to make our own hummus from scratch as a surprise for Mud. He’d have been about ten at the time, I had yet to discover the joys of cooking so it was an adventure for both of us especially as we didn’t have an actual recipe.

How hard could it be? I picked up the ingredients which were basically tinned chickpeas, jars of tahini, garlic, lemon and oil.

We didn’t have a food processor so put a can of chickpeas in a pan and mushed them up with a potato masher, we then stupidly added the entire jar of tahini and a bit of crushed garlic, oil and lemon and presented it to Mud to taste.

It was horrible, the tahini made it very bitter. I now know that only two teaspoons of tahini are required per tin of chickpeas, back then neither of us were keen to admit defeat so in went another tin of chickpeas followed by another and another. I’d bought a pack of four as I’d envisioned immediate success being repeated in a regular basis.

The gloopy nonsense grew and grew until finally, still tasting horrible and with no other receptacle big enough to further continue, we abandoned the massive festering beige mass and there it sat all weekend till Mud threw it away.