Falafel

Steven and I both had the day off on Saturday so we decided to cook something complicated. And so began the great falafel adventure.

Here's our recipe:

• 1 (15 ounce) can chickpeas (garbanzo beans), drained
• 1 onion, chopped
• 1/2 cup fresh parsley
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 egg
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon ground coriander
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 dash pepper
• 1 pinch cayenne pepper
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 cup dry bread crumbs
• oil for frying

There's also instructions for the cucumber sauce, but we just went to Pita Pit and grabbed a couple of containers of their tzatziki sauce in the interest of saving time. Also in the interest of being lazy and not owning a blender, we decided to chop all of the vegetables. Bad news. Especially when we discovered, 24 hours too late, that a clove of garlic is that little thing that comes out of the bulb of garlic that you buy at the store. So really we ended up making garlic and onion balls, with a splash of garbanzo beans. And it took three hours and 45 minutes.


I got to mash up the garbanzo beans and then mix all the vegetables together. So much onion. So much garlic.

Happy little Steven, spending a wasted hour chopping garlic. If only we had known!

I was also in charge of making bread crumbs. Somehow, when you're forced to do this for a meal, it's much more complicated. It was also complicated by my frustration and hunger and the fact that I didn't have any sandwich bread, old bread, a hammer, or any plastic baggies. After toasting and baking and mashing this new sourdough bread to no avail, we finally found an old box of croutons and beat them with a pair of pliers until we had bread crumbs aplenty.

The after dinner entertainment. Dan in Real Life is excellent- by the way. So sweet and funny and Steve Carrell-y.

And the after after dinner entertainment. Steven won. Again. Then he tried to teach me Monopoly strategy and I went bankrupt after two times around the board. How does that happen?

Back to dinner. Still going. We made the actual falafel balls wayyyy too big. They fell apart immediately. Also, they stay together and are much healthier if you bake them instead of frying them. But that takes longer, and we were finally resorting to shortcuts.

The fixings! Our pita bread was too small. I would recommend the actual pita pockets.

And finally on the plate, ready for eating. It doesn't look incredibly appetizing here, but that's just because of the orange plate and pink fork. They were really yummy, even with the excessive amount of onion and garlic. I promise.

On Memorial Day we watched a bunch of Food Network specials on barbequing. So tonight we're going to experiment with spices and create our own rub. I think we'll leave out the garlic.