You Can't Stop the Beet (Hummus)

I was sent this recipe for beet hummus, and I got really excited about making it. Excited enough to make a special trip to Whole Foods for tahini.

The rhetoric was convincing:

For those of you out there who cannot fathom even the idea of beets, fine. Truly, I'm a-okay with it. That only means there is more of this beet hummus for me. I ate this entire batch, save one teaspoon that my mother caught just in time, before it was all finished off. (In this family, you snooze, you lose.) Seriously, if you like beets, and you like hummus, you'll love this beet hummus.

And the pictures were gorgeous. Seriously, don't look at my photograph; go see what it's supposed to look like.

I concede that my first mistake was substituting the beets we had (a big pinkish-white one and a handful of little yellow ones) for the typical vivid bloody crimson ones the recipe used. Fair.

But the real problem, as Liz incisively noted, is that it's really just mashed beets. Which taste okay, but not really like hummus in any particular way. And mashed beets might not be the thing, you know, that people want on their tortilla chips at a party.

(So, we have a lot of mashed beets in our refrigerator now. Jack tried to rehabilitate the hummus by doubling all the ingredients besides the beets -- more tahini, more cumin, more oil -- which helped a bit, and reminded me of this Middle Eastern carrot dip, which I really love. But the hummus is still a bit of an elephant in the refrigerator, and we're wondering if we can transmogrify it to soup.)