falafel

This weekend we made an impromptu onion dip - I ground an onion with cream cheese, pickled ramps, garlic, buttermilk power, and salt - in order to have with these awesome puffed rice-and-corn Indian snacks called Kurkure, which are like green chutney flavored Cheetos.

(We miss out, you know. Our only Cheetos are cheese-flavored and the occasional variant like chili-cheese, flaming hot, nacho. Doritos' killer app was Cool Ranch - I'm old enough to remember when it was introduced, but for the life of me have no idea why anyone ever ate Doritos when the red bag was all we had, cause everyone since has seemed to prefer the blue bag. But most importantly, it wasn't just a cheese variant. Cheetos seem locked in cause of their name - except in Japan, where they have caramel Cheetos, mayonnaise Cheetos, roasted chicken Cheetos, you name it, none of which have cheese - but the rest of the world has plenty of puffed corn snacks in other flavors.)

Anyway, I had leftover onion dip. What to do, what to do. Falafel!

Falafel is a crunchy on the outside, delicious on the inside, fritter of ground-up chickpeas and/or fava beans, seasoned with parsley, onion, garlic, cumin, and probably other things in other places. (They were probably originally made with fava beans, and the chickpea-only variant originated because of the prevalence of favism - a fava bean allergy - among Jews. Probably. Who knows.) This is soul food, and more non-vegetarians should get on board with it. It's also a good example of parsley contributing flavor, not just token green garnish.

I'd never made it before, so I'll just link you to the recipe I used after reading several others and a number of message board threads. A lot of contemporary recipes will use canned beans, but I saw a lot of complaints about the texture of such recipes - which makes sense because, as surprising as it may seem, falafel traditionally uses chickpeas/favas that have been soaked but not cooked. The soaking - a full 24 hour soak, not merely overnight - is sufficient, if your chickpeas aren't years-old, to soften them enough that once they're ground up with the other ingredients and deep-fried, you're good to go.

Changes I made were purely because of what I did and didn't have in the house: I used one bunch of parsley, since I had no cilantro; I had no coriander seed, so left it out; I used ground ancho chile for the hot pepper, just cause I particularly like ancho with cumin and garlic. My falafel stayed in the refrigerator overnight, simply because I wanted to grind everything last night so that I could get the Cuisinart in the dishwasher.

Real easy. Real good.

mahna mahna

This is muhammara, a Middle Eastern red pepper dip.  More or less.

I didn't have all the traditional ingredients in the house, and even if I did, making authentic muhammara involves more quantum smearing than cooking -- as a dish made slightly differently in different countries, it is subject to the same debate as any other regional dish (pizza, barbecue), in which every version is wrong by someone else's standards and few things are universal and yet somehow all are still recognizably the thing in question.

In this case, I didn't have any walnuts in the house, nor olive oil.  For the walnuts, I substituted Brazil nuts; the nuts are not used in great quantities in this dish anyway.  For the olive oil ... look, every Mediterranean recipe that calls for oil will call for olive oil, unless some gourmet food vendor is trying to sell you some argan oil.  This isn't because of olive oil's superiority.  It's because of its convenience in the Mediterranean.  There are times when substituting will significantly change the dish, times when it won't, and times when a change does not mean the dish will be any worse.

I didn't have olive oil.  I used pecan oil and a little corn oil.

Some versions of muhammara call for bulghur wheat; many recipes in English cookbooks will call for breadcrumbs.  I used cooked wheat berries, which are pretty close to bulghur.

So anyway.  All told, what do we have here?  Roasted red peppers, both sweet and hot; I dried the hot ones (cherry peppers) out in the oven and used them skin and all, while roasting the sweet ones conventionally and peeling them.  A total in volume equivalent to four medium-to-large bell peppers.  About a handful of cooked wheat berries, and an equal amount of roasted Brazil nuts.  A few tablespoons of pecan oil and a drizzle of corn oil.  A few tablespoons of pomegranate molasses.  Whir whir whir in the Cuisinart.

The result is sweet, peppery, tangy, with a little bite.  The flavor will keep developing for a few days, which is good cause I'm almost out of chips and the dip will develop until I pick up some more.