Hummus

Item: Athenos Travelers Hummus and Pita What you get: 2 1/2 servings of two tablespoons of hummus and two pieces of bread (in reality, one snack or lunch) Cost: About $2 Nutritional content: Roasted Red Pepper - 140 calories, 6 grams fat, 1 gram saturated fat, 410 milligrams sodium; Roasted Garlic - 130 calories, 6 grams fat, 1 gram saturated fat, 370 milligrams sodium Preparation time: Open and eat Review: I found myself wishing for more pita bread or some raw vegetables when I tried Athenos' new hummus snack kits.

Annapolis Town Center has opened five new restaurants and two financial services companies. Below is a description and  list: Fidelity, t he 4,958-square-foot investor center at Annapolis Towne Centre will offer a full range of investment products and services to individual mutual fund and brokerage customers. Flat Top Grill , a create-your-own stir fry restaurant that features fresh ingredients and house-made sauces in an interactive setting. The 3,497-square-foot location will be Flat Top Grill’s 17 th restaurant nationwide, and the first one on the entire eastern seaboard.

An appetizer from the Middle East called hummus and made of garbanzo beans has become a favorite in this country. It's a mixture of pureed beans, garlic, olive oil and tahini (pureed sesame seeds). This last is sold in cans.The dip is great on vegetables, chips and, best of all, small pieces of Middle Eastern pita bread. All of these are acceptable, but the hummus itself, made the old-fashioned way, is full of oil.Now, with the '90s upon us, variations have appeared that are as 66TC good as the original.

I get a shiver of satisfaction bordering on smugness when I find a little restaurant that does one or two things well, or that offers an out-of-the-ordinary menu, or that dishes up low-cost comfort food. So I feel pleasantly snooty that I visited Hummus Corner before some of my foodie friends. True to its name, Hummus Corner occupies an end unit in a strip mall that includes pizza, Chinese and sub restaurants. Plenty of dining choices and all of them predictable offerings. And all of them serve a densely packed zone of apartment and condo complexes around Lakeside and Owings Mills boulevards.

With its good-fat, zingy taste and Mediterranean elan, hummus is an appetizer of champions. Not only plain hummus but its flavored offspring are popular enough now to be available in every supermarket. But which tastes best? A panel of Taste section staffers conducted a blind tasting of four brands of roasted red-pepper hummus available locally. In this case, we were happy to learn that the least-expensive choices had actually fared best. Our winner was the Giant brand Simply Enjoy, which made a nice presentation and had the strongest red-pepper flavor.

Every once in a while, you come across a restaurant that has distinctive, well-prepared food at sensible prices. Havana Road in Towson is such a spot; it is a find. Situated in a storefront in on Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Towson, Havana Road is small — about 30 seats — and serves only Cuban fare. But what it does with a limited menu, it does exceptionally well. Take, for example, the hummus trio ($6), an offering of black bean hummus, red hummus made with sun-dried tomatoes and hummus made with Cuban spices.

The Raw 50 By Carol Alt, with David Roth I Am Grateful: Recipes & Lifestyle of Cafe Gratitude By Terces Engelhart, with Orchid North Atlantic / 2007 / $24.95 The first cookbook from Cafe Gratitude, a group of San Francisco Bay Area restaurants, is vegan - the recipes use no animal products - and gets more into spirituality than Carol Alt's book. The recipes have names like "I Am Honoring Nachos" and "I Am Releasing Flax Crackers." But the book offers practical advice about equipment and technique, including a way to use your oven as a dehydrator.

Falafel fanatic" describes my relationship to those Middle Eastern fried spheres made with nutty-tasting garbanzo beans. Going through my wallet recently, I found several frequent-buyer cards from my favorite falafel stand. Marked with X's, they proved I had consumed 15 of the Middle Eastern sandwiches in less than a month! This shocking realization sent me into the kitchen with a plan to create a baked, more healthful version that I teamed with hummus and tabbouleh as toppings. Menu Falafel on pita with hummus and tabbouleh Greek salad Rice pudding Sparkling water Falafel on Pita With Hummus and Tabbouleh Preparation time: 15 minutes; cooking time: 18 minutes Makes 4 servings 1 can (15 ounces)

Annapolis Town Center has opened five new restaurants and two financial services companies. Below is a description and  list: Fidelity, t he 4,958-square-foot investor center at Annapolis Towne Centre will offer a full range of investment products and services to individual mutual fund and brokerage customers. Flat Top Grill , a create-your-own stir fry restaurant that features fresh ingredients and house-made sauces in an interactive setting. The 3,497-square-foot location will be Flat Top Grill’s 17 th restaurant nationwide, and the first one on the entire eastern seaboard.

If I hadn't heard from numerous sources that Captain Larry's Bar and Grill, 601 E. Fort Ave., served really good fish tacos, I would never have considered the place for lunch. Or dinner. Or any kind of meal. I'd hung out there with friends one night. The place was packed, but it impressed me as a neighborhood tap that failed to keep up appearances because it knew it could count on steady trade from regulars that appreciated a bar within crawling distance of their rowhouses. Funky and fun for a meet-up if you're in the Federal Hill-Locust Point area, but otherwise, no thanks.

Every once in a while, you come across a restaurant that has distinctive, well-prepared food at sensible prices. Havana Road in Towson is such a spot; it is a find. Situated in a storefront in on Pennsylvania Avenue in downtown Towson, Havana Road is small — about 30 seats — and serves only Cuban fare. But what it does with a limited menu, it does exceptionally well. Take, for example, the hummus trio ($6), an offering of black bean hummus, red hummus made with sun-dried tomatoes and hummus made with Cuban spices.

If I hadn't heard from numerous sources that Captain Larry's Bar and Grill, 601 E. Fort Ave., served really good fish tacos, I would never have considered the place for lunch. Or dinner. Or any kind of meal. I'd hung out there with friends one night. The place was packed, but it impressed me as a neighborhood tap that failed to keep up appearances because it knew it could count on steady trade from regulars that appreciated a bar within crawling distance of their rowhouses. Funky and fun for a meet-up if you're in the Federal Hill-Locust Point area, but otherwise, no thanks.

With its good-fat, zingy taste and Mediterranean elan, hummus is an appetizer of champions. Not only plain hummus but its flavored offspring are popular enough now to be available in every supermarket. But which tastes best? A panel of Taste section staffers conducted a blind tasting of four brands of roasted red-pepper hummus available locally. In this case, we were happy to learn that the least-expensive choices had actually fared best. Our winner was the Giant brand Simply Enjoy, which made a nice presentation and had the strongest red-pepper flavor.

The Raw 50 By Carol Alt, with David Roth I Am Grateful: Recipes & Lifestyle of Cafe Gratitude By Terces Engelhart, with Orchid North Atlantic / 2007 / $24.95 The first cookbook from Cafe Gratitude, a group of San Francisco Bay Area restaurants, is vegan - the recipes use no animal products - and gets more into spirituality than Carol Alt's book. The recipes have names like "I Am Honoring Nachos" and "I Am Releasing Flax Crackers." But the book offers practical advice about equipment and technique, including a way to use your oven as a dehydrator.

Falafel fanatic" describes my relationship to those Middle Eastern fried spheres made with nutty-tasting garbanzo beans. Going through my wallet recently, I found several frequent-buyer cards from my favorite falafel stand. Marked with X's, they proved I had consumed 15 of the Middle Eastern sandwiches in less than a month! This shocking realization sent me into the kitchen with a plan to create a baked, more healthful version that I teamed with hummus and tabbouleh as toppings. Menu Falafel on pita with hummus and tabbouleh Greek salad Rice pudding Sparkling water Falafel on Pita With Hummus and Tabbouleh Preparation time: 15 minutes; cooking time: 18 minutes Makes 4 servings 1 can (15 ounces)

Can you get a buzz from these things?" we asked the only other customer at the Zeeba Lounge on a recent Friday night, as he sucked hard on his hookah, a water pipe filled with flavorings and tobacco. He certainly looked buzzed, his eyes at half mast, his face dreamy. "If you concentrate," he said. He had come to Zeeba to relax, he said, after a night working as a busboy in a touristy local restaurant. And what better place to escape all those customers, all that noise, all that food and drink, than a place that has almost none of the above?

Cafe Hon's new digs look something like a nice old-fashioned Hampden eatery -- but all bright and shiny, the way '90s versions of '50s diners are.You'll be eating off a table that will remind you of your mom's kitchen table. The china is mismatched. But everything is freshly painted (off white, with the exposed pipes painted silver). There's a handsome bar. And you'll love those chandeliers made from coffee cups. The new Cafe Hon, which moved from a smaller spot across the street, is still homey; but now it's chic as well, hon.Owner Denise Whiting didn't change the menu when she moved.

The Luna-C Grille has almost everything a post-millennium restaurant needs. It has a bistro feel. It's the kind of place where you can have dinner in your yogawear after working out at the nearby Columbia Gym. It's pretty good at being all things to all people, so you can bring your kids or have an intimate dinner for two -- and not feel out of place in either case. The menu ranges from sandwiches and salads to full-scale dinners. On the night we were there, a jazz trio played soft music to soothe harried customers.

The Luna-C Grille has almost everything a post-millennium restaurant needs. It has a bistro feel. It's the kind of place where you can have dinner in your yogawear after working out at the nearby Columbia Gym. It's pretty good at being all things to all people, so you can bring your kids or have an intimate dinner for two -- and not feel out of place in either case. The menu ranges from sandwiches and salads to full-scale dinners. On the night we were there, a jazz trio played soft music to soothe harried customers.