By Sarah Curtis
@sarahcurtiswriter
The day after I dropped off my oldest daughter at college for the first time, I found myself sitting alone in my kitchen wondering what to do with my day. Not my life exactly, though that too to a degree, but my day: the hours directly in front of me. My two younger daughters, ages twelve and fourteen, were upstairs lost in the reverie of their phones. My husband was at work. I was alone with the dog, and I’d already walked her once.
I considered cleaning out my oldest’s bedroom, but the idea of collecting her sandy socks and throwing away her errant vape pens just seemed sad. I couldn’t work on the manuscript I’d finished because it was in my agent’s hands. I couldn’t tackle my pile of half-read library books because my brain was too unfocused. I couldn’t go for a run because I was having issues with my knee. I couldn’t even do yoga, my go-to stress reliever, because my physical therapist had told me the problem with my knee was actually my hamstring, which I’d strained years ago and likely continued to damage with all my down dogs. I hadn’t known it was possible to overdo yoga, but that’s middle age for you. Every problem has tentacles and even the good stuff can bite you in the ass. It was two in the afternoon, too early for a glass of wine, though believe me, I considered it.
Instead I stared out the window at my pot of dying begonias and the bird feeder I never remembered to fill and thought about, of all things, hummus.
I used to make hummus a lot when my husband and I were first married, living in a small loft apartment in Chicago. I made it so often I’d memorized the recipe: three or so cups cooked chickpeas, one to two smashed garlic cloves, one-fourth cup tahini, a few hearty glugs of olive oil, salt, half a lemon, a dash of hot sauce, blended with a bit of ice water until it reached a perfect creamy consistency. Sometimes I used canned chickpeas, but more often I soaked dried ones overnight and cooked them myself. Once I read a food blogger say that the secret to the creamiest hummus was peeling each individual chickpea and reader, I did it (I’m happy to report it didn’t make a difference, and you can achieve the same result by processing the chickpeas on their own before adding the other ingredients).
After I pureed the hummus, I’d rinse out the food processor and throw in a handful of parsley along with some olive oil and lemon zest, then blitz it to make a verdant herbed oil. I’d spread the hummus on a platter and sprinkle the top with paprika or, even better, sumac if I had it on hand, placing three Kalamata olives in the center. I liked the visual effect of three. It reminded me of Sambuca, the liqueur my Italian father-in-law sometimes ordered after a meal, and how it always arrived with three coffee beans at the bottom of the glass for health, wealth, and happiness. Finally I’d drizzle the herbed oil around the edges. On a separate plate, I’d toast pita triangles and arrange them artfully beside carrot sticks and endive spears.
People loved my hummus. Friends and family would ask me to make it for get-togethers, and there were never any leftovers. When my husband finished graduate school in Chicago, we celebrated with a trip to France. In Paris, we sought out the Jewish quarter where I ate the Platonic ideal of hummus and what remain the best falafels I’ve ever tasted, wrapped in a warm flatbread and spiked with a vinegary slaw of carrots and red cabbage. When I got back to the states, I started making my own version of falafels alongside my hummus. I was on my way to becoming a hummus expert, a real aesthete.
Now I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d made hummus from scratch. When I became a mom, I started buying it out of a container. Grocery store hummus is fine, and I sometimes I still eat it when I get hungry in the middle of the day with bagged baby carrots, standing at my kitchen counter eyeing the oven clock. But there’s something sad about it. If you’ve ever had homemade hummus you know there’s no comparison. The store-bought stuff reminds me of something a friend of mine said once when we were eating powdered eggs at a bad hotel breakfast buffet. “These aren’t eggs,” she said, laying down her fork in defeat. “They’re just the idea of eggs.”
Grocery store hummus fills the void, but it’s not really hummus. It is to hummus what bagged baby carrots are to farmer’s market carrots. The mere idea of the thing.
This day I did not have dried chickpeas in the pantry, so I used canned. I also did not have the energy to make parsley oil. But I did make the hummus just as I used to, spread on a plate and drizzled with fruity olive oil. I toasted a package of naan from my freezer and cut it into triangles. Then I called my daughters downstairs to try it.
“Thish ish sho much better than the other hummush,” my youngest mumbled with her mouth full. “Why you never made thish for ush?”
How to answer? Because raising three kids meant taking shortcuts, and homemade hummus became one of countless casualties, along with spontaneous trips to the beach, pedicures, and weekends spent lying in bed reading books and drinking lukewarm coffee. How many other simple joys had I deprived myself over the years? Or more to the point, how much of my identity had been waylaid by diapers and drop-offs and laundry and birthday parties and peanut-free lunches and half-eaten dinners and sports and laundry and school concerts and college tours and did I mention laundry? It had been less than twenty-four hours since I went from having three kids under my roof to two, and already I was finding my way back to someone I’d forgotten, a woman with an interesting past, a woman who made her own hummus. What other parts of myself had I forsaken?
“I don’t know,” I said between bites. “I guess I just got busy.”
Sarah Curtis is a writer whose essays have been widely published in literary journals and noted in the Best American Essays series. She lives with her family in a 170-year-old farmhouse in Michigan. When she is not peeling chickpeas or slowly killing her plants, she is at work on a biographical memoir. More of her writing can be found at sarahcurtiswriter.com.
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