Bread and Dips

The parents came over for dinner this weekend to see my new flat, so in between frantic cleaning, I had to plan what to make, the perfect excuse to spend some time cooking new things!

I recently went for dinner at the Portobello Organic Kitchen, which was fabulous, thankfully, we knew the chef so got a bit of a discount, but this just meant that we ended up eating twice as much as we would have. Anyway, for starters/canapes, we had homemade bread and dips.

The above was our attempt to recreate this and it was AMAZING, even if I say so myself.

We used Delia's pizza dough recipe, except we mixed in a handful of black olives too. Make up the dough, leave it to prove once, knock it back and then split in two, roll each ball out to about 1cm thickness, place on a baking tray, drizzle with oil and bake at 180C for 20mins

The dips were homemade hummus and tapenade. Both are really easy to make, especially if you have a little blender, and so much better than the ready made version. For the hummus, I get my chickpeas from one of the shops on the way home in brixton, they're much bigger and softer than the little bullets the supermarkets seem to be selling these days, I also use a bit of yoghurt to loosen my hummus, it means you have to use less oil and adds a little creaminess. For the tapenade, I used good quality kalamata olives, those cheap you can buy in a tin, are really just green olives dyed black and not worth bothering with, especially as the quality of the olives really affects how the tapenade will taste.

Hummus

1 can chickpeas, drained
1 clove garlic
1tbsp tahini
juice ½ lemon
1 tbsp yoghurt
salt and pepper

Put all the ingredients in a blender and whizz, add more yoghurt if it seems a bit stiff. Drizzle olive oil over to serve. If you don't have a blender, you can mash the chickpeas first with a fork and then mix in the finely chopped garlic and the rest of the ingredients.

Black Olive Tapenade

200g black olives
1 garlic clove
4 anchovy fillets
juice ½-1 lemon
2tbsp olive oil

Add all the ingredients to a blender and whizz, adding more lemon juice if needed. Don't whizz too much as you want to keep a bit of texture. If you don't have a blender, just chop the olives, anchovies and garlic finely and mix with the oil and lemon juice.

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