White Bean Hummus

Seven weeks until the end. Seven weeks until I close the classroom door for the last time and walk out of Oceanside High School and become a woman who used to teach. The "used to" is the hardest part — the tense change, the shift from present to past, from "I teach" to "I taught," from the active, living, daily verb of teaching to the past participle of having taught, which is grammatically complete and emotionally devastating. I am an English teacher. I know what tenses do. They locate you in time. And soon my time in the classroom will be located in the past, and the past is where the dead things live, and I am not dead, and the teaching is not dead, but the tense says otherwise, and the tense is the truth.

But the students are still here, still present-tense, still needing me to stand in front of them and tell them that Shakespeare matters and Dickens matters and the sentence they wrote on page three of their essay does not make grammatical sense and needs to be revised. I am teaching with a ferocity that surprises even me — harder, closer, more demanding than I have been in years, because the finite nature of the remaining weeks has concentrated my attention the way a deadline concentrates a writer's: everything matters more when you know it's ending.

I made a spring minestrone — light, green, with fresh peas and asparagus and spinach, the spring version of the heavy winter soup, the soup that says: the season is turning, the garden is starting, the world is renewing itself, even as you are ending something. The soup was bright and good and I ate it at the kitchen table where I have been eating for forty years and where I will continue eating for the foreseeable future, and the continuity of the table is the comfort, the table that has held me through forty-two years of teaching and will hold me through whatever comes next.

The cannellini beans were already in my pantry because I had used a handful of them in the minestrone — that bright, green, almost unbearably hopeful soup I made the week I started counting down my final weeks at Oceanside High. I had beans left over, and the table that has held me through forty-two years was still there, and I needed something else to make, something with my hands, something that required the kind of attention that keeps grief at bay for twenty minutes at a stretch. So I made this hummus — white and creamy and lemony, the beans from the soup transformed into something you spread on bread and share, which felt exactly right for a woman trying to understand how the things she has always made can keep changing shape.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 0 min | Total Time: 10 min | Servings: 8

Ingredients

2 cans (15 oz each) cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
3 tablespoons tahini
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (about 1 large lemon)
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more to taste
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
2–4 tablespoons cold water, as needed
Fresh flat-leaf parsley, smoked paprika, and a drizzle of olive oil, for garnish

Instructions

Blend the base. Add the drained cannellini beans, tahini, lemon juice, and garlic to the bowl of a food processor. Process for about 30 seconds until the mixture is roughly combined and beginning to smooth out.
Stream in the oil. With the processor running, slowly drizzle in the 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Add the salt and cumin. Continue processing for 1–2 minutes, scraping down the sides as needed, until the hummus is very smooth and creamy.
Adjust the consistency. With the processor still running, add cold water one tablespoon at a time until the hummus reaches your preferred texture — silky and just loose enough to swirl easily in a bowl.
Taste and season. Stop and taste. Adjust with additional lemon juice or salt as needed. Process for another 10 seconds to incorporate any final additions.
Serve. Spoon the hummus into a wide, shallow bowl. Use the back of the spoon to create a swirl. Drizzle generously with olive oil, dust with smoked paprika, and scatter torn fresh parsley over the top. Serve with warm pita, crackers, or sliced spring vegetables.

Nutrition (per serving)

White Bean Hummus — The Same Beans That Float in the Soup That Held Me