Yesterday I decided to finally try my hand at the stretchy bean-thing and put some chickpeas up for soaking.

Today I bought a bag of watercress. Now I’ve bought this stuff before, a good while ago, and didn’t care for it much. I can’t remember what I did with it, probably made some kind of basic salad, but the flavour was a bit too sharp.
Still, I’d seen the stuff mentioned, and it’s supposed to be healthy and actually quite good when prepared properly.
It has it’s followers, with a festival and an alliance and everything.
Unfortunately, the festival is not anywhere near me, so I’ll miss out on some good old veg-veneration and morris dancing (I’m not actually being sarcastic. I think I’d truly enjoy that kind of thing). unless I plan my holiday around it (don’t think I’m not tempted. It’s on the UK’s South coast, so not too far away).

Anyway, I was still not too sure about just doing any random thing with it, so I looked for some recipes.
The festive site gave me a neat recipe for watercress hummus, which was great considering I already had them chickpeas going, and some more googling got me a simple-looking watercress soup, which also called for chickpeas. Is that great, or what?
As per usual, I didn’t follow the recipes to the letter and basically did my own thing as far as quantities and spices were concerned.

I decided to go stretchy on the watercress as well and make both these things. I used about a third of the watercress for the hummus and about two-thirds for the soup. I considered keeping some for a smoothie, but figured I could just buy some more later.
I also made some standard hummus with coriander leaves as the green bit and kept some chickpeas seperate for making some other random food. Perhaps something involving quinoa. I’ve not made anything with that for a while, and I still have some coriander leaves left.

So far I’ve not yet tried the watercress hummus, but the soup is most tasty and has a familiar greeny flavour I can’t quite place. Chervil, perhaps?
Against all expectations, it actually tastes, well, quite soft. Very nice.

Unfortunately my beloved shoyu contains wheat, so I couldn’t put any of that in any of my lovely foods. I’ll have to get me some tamari later.

Vessels containing stretchy food:

I have quite a lot of hummus now. Not a bad thing, really, but still. I’ve frozen some for later use, but I’ll have to eat some freezer food if I want to freeze some more.
Between using a lot of coriander leaves and using a fair bit of watercress, I can’t actually tell the different kinds of hummus apart. I expect I’ll be able to taste the difference, though.
Nutritional analysis of the soup. Probably not exact since I guessed the quantities and didn’t bother with the salt and spices, but I still like doing it.
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