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| Food - Recipes | |
| Friday, 12 October 2007 | |
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My Failed Falafel
When I was in London for London Design Festival. (Look for the review later), I had one of the best sammiches I have EVER had in my entire life. It was a falafel sandwich with baba ghanoush, sun dried tomatoes and pumpkin seed butter. That little sammich was SO good it has stayed burned in my mind since. When I got back home, I thought I'd try to recreate it, minus the sundried tomatoes and the pumpkin seed butter (because I didn't have any in the house). I pulled out a Madhur Jaffrey book for the falafel recipe and got to work. At a certain point in the recipe, she advises that the falafel mixture shouldn't be compressed, it should just stick together. I had my doubts about mine holding up, but I kept going. I heated up the oil, put the loosely formed patties in, and before my very eyes, they all fell apart. I tasted some of the crumble when it cooled a bit on a towel and decided I would make little toasts. The toasts were slammin'.
And then I turned on the oven, placed the 'loosely formed' patties on parchment paper, and baked them up, and proceeded to make a sammich. The sammich was good, now I am waiting for my friend to mail me pumpkin seed butter from London... In the meantime, if anyone knows how to make a falafel that will hold up in frying, please let me know at hello <at> threelayercake <dot> com. The falafel recipe isn't mine, so I won't print it. And neither is the baba ghanoush, but I've been making it so long I can't even remember what the REAL recipe is, so here's what I do. There is always a small tupperware dish of this in our refrigerator: 
Take one medium sized eggplant, poke it all over with a fork, and put it on a foil lined tray in the oven at 400F/200C until it starts to turn black all over (and smell like it's burning). Turn the eggplant several times so that it browns all over. Remove the eggplant from the oven. When it cools enough to handle it, remove the skin, drain the pulp a bit, and place it all in one bowl. In a mortar and pestle, smash two cloves of garlic with 1/2 teaspoon salt until they form a paste. Add this to the eggplant. Add three or four tablespoons of tahini, and add lemon juice, starting with one whole lemon adding more to taste. You won't be able to tell the true flavors until the mixture has sat for a while, so be conservative at first. Mix everything vigorously with a fork until it is homogeneous. If you choose to do your mixing in a food processor, it will come out smoother, without changing the taste.
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