Roasted carrot hummus with parsley oil | Nourish ep 1

There’s always a lot of talk at this time of year about how unsustainable and unhelpful the usual January dieting rhetoric can be, but this usually involves a lot of restriction, unnatural levels of self-control and frustration on the eaters’ end. Dieting in this way feels like a ‘means to an end’ process to me, whereby the means are dissatisfaction, restriction and deprivation and the end is maybe a few pounds off the scale but with angst and a stressful, tangled attitude towards food going forward as you desperately try to maintain the scale number but struggle to maintain the restriction.

We all know that eating well is important for looking after our bodies, health and functioning, but it’s hard to know what eating well means in a world of contradictory claims, obsessions with protein supplements, macros and deficits. The approach I take now is to focus on building my meals around whole foods, minimally processed foods, lots of colour, balance, variety and foods that I just feel better for eating. That’s really what this new ‘nourish’ series was born from; a want to shift away from the usual talk of numbers, substitutions and percentages when it comes to healthy eating and instead just focusing on these whole, natural foods that have nourished us for thousands of years and to feel better for it. I really hope you’ll enjoy this series and I hope it helps you to build more nourishing meals into your life to help you feel your best!

I’ve started this series with this roasted carrot hummus and parsley oil because it’s preppable, easy and familiar for most of us with a nice point of difference with the parsley oil. And in case you’re sat there thinking ‘parsley oil, really? what a faff’, it’s honestly worth making! You can use it on so many other dishes so it’s a real ‘make once, enjoy several times’ kind of recipe. I like to use it to top soups, in salad dressings, to roast vegetables with and to use as a dipping oil for bread.

Ingredients:

Hummus:

x1 400g canned chickpeas drained

1/2tsp ground cumin

Juice of 1/2 lemon

4tbsp tahini

3 large carrots peeled and cut into rough chunks

1tbsp olive oil

Season to taste with salt

Parsley oil

30g fresh flat leaf parsley

50ml olive oil

1/2tsp salt

Muslin cloth or j cloth

Method

Preheat the oven to 200c

Drizzle the olive oil over the carrots in a roasting tray and bake for 20 minutes.

In a food processor, process the chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice and cumin until smooth. For an extra smooth hummus, add in a couple of ice cubes! Once smooth, add the carrots and process again until smooth. Season with salt to taste.

For the parsley oil, blanche the parsley by dropping into boiling water for about 30 seconds before draining and blending with the oil and salt. blend until smooth and velvety and then pour into a sieve lined with muslin cloth or a j cloth over a bowl and squeeze the cloth to separate the pulp from the oil which will collect in the bowl below.

Drizzle a little of the oil over the hummus spread on to your plate or bowl and top with anything else you like (dukkah, chopped nuts, fresh parsley etc)" and enjoy!