doughnuts and broccoli hummus

My office is ill-situated outside a long counter that routinely houses all the junk food people bring to share.  Intended for paper cutting and stapling, it's instead typically a diet sinker.  Not only can I see its contents from sitting at my desk, but I have to walk past it to get to the restroom, get a water refill or pick up a copy--essentially, anything I do that's not at my desk.

I used to be really bad about being one of those people who cuts off "a bite," which would inevitably turn into an entire doughnut (or whatever) in the timespan of a whole day, because of course I'd need "a bite" at just about every walk-by.  That habit's long gone, but some days I miss it more than others, and yesterday was one of those days. I don't even really care about doughnuts, but Top Pot was looking mighty fine and there were four full boxes sitting out.  On top of that, two different coworkers separately brought a box into my office offering me a diet FAIL, and one coworker even went so far as to put a full box on my desk while whispering sweet doughnut talk (or that's how it sounded to me, anyway!).

Good thing I was stuffed with broccoli hummus.  (How's that for a 180?)

I'm not eating raw, but I am in love with the Choosing Raw site.  Unlike a lot of raw sites, her recipes aren't laden with pounds of cashews and nut butters, which are delicious, but just not something I'm indulging in at the moment.  She has so many creative, and new-to-me ways to eat vegetables. Convenient, because vegetables are my current focus and learning about raw food is interesting. For a good example of why I like her site, check out this post on How to Build a Meal Sized Salad.  I can't wait to try out the raw cauliflower rice!

I have really been missing hummus, so when I spied something in that meal sized salad post called broccoli hummus, the sun shined, birds sang and the seas parted. The idea of making a "hummus" without starchy garbanzos was groundbreaking to me!  I made it the next day. 

I followed CR's recipe pretty closely, except I used:

tahini sauce instead of raw/plain tahini.  It's all I could find at Trader Joe's. It's mostly tahini, with the addition of spices and lemon juice.  I realized this after I already added the spices and juice of one lemon called for in the recipe, but it turned out just fine and not over-seasoned at all.

broccolini instead of broccoli. Confession: I hate broccoli. Always have, always will; however, I'm in such a desperate state of needing hummus (umm, wow), I chose to forgo my disdain for broccoli for this experiment.

chia seed gel.  I couldn't get my mix thick enough, and I didn't want to overdo it on the broccolini, thought the zucchini might add too much water and the tahini too much fat (I was already going light on it), so what's a texsea girl to do but add chia gel!  It thickened up perfectly and didn't alter the taste (though of course tahini would have been awesome).

It made an excellent dressing and was such a nice change of pace from the plain balsamic I've been loyal to the last couple of months.  Today I'm going to eat the hummus as a dip with some raw crackers, romaine lettuce pieces (almost like chips, right? ;-) ) and grape tomatoes.  Yum!  Is it lunch yet??