The Review Board: Pita Bread

...and hummus...sort of.

About a month or two ago, I attempted to make pita bread. Why not? It's tasty! Well, here's why not:
-With an oven above 400 degrees, I almost burned myself. A lot.
-They poof up, which makes them very hard to handle once cooked.
-I don't have a nice fancy oven stone, so I had to use a cookie sheet that loves to bend and warp during cooking.
-The recipe required you to flip the pitas half way through. Again, with the burning myself. (When baking, it's really better for me to keep my hands out of the oven as much as possible.)
-As I was trying to retrieve the now-sphericalish pita from the oven, I dropped it. Into the oven. Backstory: I started out this semester by dropping an oven mitt onto an oven coil. It caught on fire a little bit. In another adventure, I hit my hand against the other oven coil and had a very large, decently severe burn. I love baking, but I'm kind of afraid of our oven now. Flashfoward to...the last time I made pita bread, when I dropped the pita. I'm flying through drawers, whipping out spatulas and tongs and forks, trying to figure out the best way to rescue this little demon before he burned my apartment complex down. Finally, the pita was nestled out of the crack of the oven and onto a plate, where it looked perfectly done. Of course.
In it's defense, the batch did turn out tasty and I didn't have to spend money on it. It was just very labor intensive and turned out rather crispy.

Today, I decided to try a new recipe. This one had slightly different methodology. It can be found here.
I don't remember the actual recipe for the first batch, so I couldn't tell you if they were different or not. I can, however, tell you that in this recipe, I:
-Used honey instead of sugar
-Kind of wished I'd used wheat flour, because I eat white breads too much
-Needed probably a full extra cup of flour than called for. That's Rexy for you though.

This recipe didn't require me to flip the pita, which was a huge plus. I'm still amazed that the little buggers cook in 3 minutes! It also recommended using the bottom of the cookie sheet, which seemed a lot better for this task. I now have a stack of delicious pitas sitting on my counter, perfectly done, and without a single burn on my hands. Now, for the hummus.

I hesitate to really review this because I question it. Even though I sit here eating it with carrots while I type, it still concerns me. Part of my thriftiness comes from the bulk bins at Winco, which is the place to get spices, grains, (candy) and other things that you want in greater or lesser quantities than you can find on a shelf. In our last jaunt, I found hummus mix. You add water and EVOO and suddenly, hummus. I don't know if it's the right texture or anything. I just know that powdered hummus makes me suspicious, but I added red pepper flakes and it masks the carroty taste of these carrots quite nicely. If anyone tries it out, let me know what you think?

Happy eating!