domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

That’s right, falafel! Falafel! is so awesome that it gets its own exclamation mark.

Here’s the thing. I really, really like falafel. (Enough exclamation marks. They give me hives after a while. Please pretend that there is an exclamation mark of happiness after every instance of falafel.) Unfortunately, living where I live, falafel options are pretty limited. There is–or there was, anyhow, five or ten years ago–this super-amazing place on Lorain and W117 in Cleveland where you could get a giant falafel of deliciousness for $2, but (1)it’s an hour-long drive, and (2) it may or may not exist any longer.

Anyhow, all of that is basically to say that when I want falafel now, I pretty much have to make it. Luckily, falafel is super easy to make, and requires pretty minimal work.

That was supper a few nights ago. Lesley asked me to post the recipe, so here we go.

First, you should make tzatziki. I realized after I’d started cooking that I had no dill, so mine was less delicious than it could have been, but it was still damn tasty. Take a container of plain yogurt and mix it with grated cucumber, minced garlic, dill, and a little salt. If you’re the kind of person who plans ahead, you could do worse than letting the yogurt drain a little bit first–the sauce gets rather thin if you don’t. (Delicious! Just messy.)

Let the sauce hang out in the fridge while you make the falafel.

2 cans chickpeas, rinsed and drained (If you’re a better person than I am, you could start with dried chickpeas and soak them overnight and then boil them for a few minutes, but I don’t usually plan meals that far in advance, and, frankly, canned ones are easy.)
1 small onion, minced (or half a giant onion)
1 bunch fresh parsley or cilantro, chopped
garlic, grated or minced (I used a bunch of garlic–like eight cloves–because I love garlic. Normal people probably do not want that much garlic in their falafel, so maybe two or three cloves would be better.)
cumin
salt
pepper
lemon juice
ground coriander (omit if you’re using cilantro.)
2 eggs
(maybe) flour

In a large pot or pan, put about 1/2″ oil and start heating it. I set my burners to just above medium and left them there, and it was fine. (My thermometer melted in an ill-advised candy-making experiment a while back, so I can’t give a precise temperature. That said, the oil’s hot enough when you drop in a pinch of chickpea mixture and it bubbles.)

Grab a serving fork and mash your chickpeas. When they’re mashed, mix in the garlic, parsley, and onion. Add about a tablespoon of lemon juice and mix that in. The spices are to taste–start with a teaspoon of cumin and half a teaspoon of coriander, mix it in, then try a pinch. Keep going until it tastes good. (We used about three teaspoons of cumin, I think, and also a dash of cayenne.)

Beat your eggs and mix them in with the chickpeas. Take about a tablespoon of the mixture and form a patty. This is your test patty. Put it into the hot oil and see how it cooks. Ideally, it’ll get all delicious and brown and will hold together when it’s flipped.

This is not what happened on my first batch, and I was not smart enough to do a test patty. Learn from my mistakes, guys.

If the patty falls apart, add maybe two tablespoons of flour to the chickpea mixture, then do another test patty. (It’ll almost certainly be fine now.) If the test patty looks good, form a bunch of patties and start cooking them–I could do about five at a time, and that worked out pretty well.

Awesome people eat falafel with pita bread, lettuce, tomatoes, feta, tahini, and tzatziki. You should have grapes on the side, because grapes are delicious, and are double-plus delicious with feta.

In not-food-related news, I have decided that my next career will be as a professional mattress tester. I’m not sure that this is actually a job, but surely someone out there has to test mattresses, right? It sounds like the greatest job ever, and, like I was saying elsewhere, it would basically give you a 32 hour day–work and sleep would combine into one magical 8-hour block, so you’d have the other sixteen hours of the day to do whatever you wanted.

Of course, most of what I want to do when I’m not working is sleeping, so I’m not quite sure what I’d want to do, but I bet I could think of something.

New Year’s resolution news: Remember how I said I wanted to be more interactive? Did you see what I did in there? I linked to TWO BLOGS written by actual people who I have spoken to. I’m so proud of myself it’s embarrassing.

Book news: I finished Connie Willis’s latest, Blackout, and am totally boggled by how amazing she is. I can’t believe that we have to wait until October for the ending. To get myself through, I’m going to reread as soon as Nick’s finished.

Knitting: I love socks. That is all.