Cauliflower Hummus

I love hummus. It is one of my favourite accompaniment to so many things, like yummy and carb laden fresh pita bread, or veggies, or crackers, or pita chips, or as a sandwich spread. Yeah, mostly to accompany my carbs…sigh.

The impetus for making hummus this week though was actually my collard greens. I have a lovely collard plant still growing in my fall garden and I’ve been reading lots of posts on using collard greens to make wraps, forgoing the classic flour tortilla. I really wanted to give this a try and making a hummus base for veggie wraps seemed like a good place to start. Lost of recipes call for cashew cream but so far I’m not a huge fan so hummus it was.

However, I’ve been trying to keep legumes off my plate (with some degree of success) and remembered reading somewhere that you could make hummus out of cauliflower. You can make EVERYTHING out of cauliflower it seems! Turns out, this is a true fact. You basically just swap out cooked cauliflower for the chickpeas, keeping all other ingredients more or less the same. I wouldn’t say it tastes exactly like traditional hummus, but man is it close.

I started this recipe with cauliflower that had already been processed to use as rice for another dish, but you could definitely just steam up some whole florets and it would make no difference. I’d say I had about half of a medium sized cauliflower and that made up my 4 cups.

I tried to make this in my small food processor but ended up switching to my Vitamix when I couldn’t get it quite as smooth as I wanted it. You may need to adjust the olive oil and lemon juice to get the right consistency. I also find that the garlic is a bit sharper than it might be with chickpeas so start with a small clove – you can always add more.

Collard wraps are on the menu for tomorrow’s lunch, but for now I’m just going to snack on my veggies with veggies.