Falafel Attempt Nr 1

Lately I've been feeling that I'm doing the same four recipes over and over again. Lundulph is a patient man and hasn't complained, but I'm sure he'd love something different. So I spotted some of my Waitrose recipe cards sticking out on top of the rest of the cook books, so I took them out and flicked through them. And what luck - one was for Garlic and herb falafels.

Reading through it, the ingredients seemed a bit unorthodox, but the whole thing seemed simple and looked very nice on the photo, so why not. I did make some changes in the cooking method...

Ingredients
Makes 12 large falafels
4 salad onions (140 g)
1 carrot (100 g)
2 x 400 g cans of chickpeas
70 g garlic and herb water biscuits
1 large egg
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 dl sesame seeds (optional)
2 tbsp olive oil

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C and place a baking tray in to warm up.
2. Trim and wash the onions, peel and wash the carrot. Cut the onion as finely as possible and finely grate and then chop the carrot.
3. Drain and rinse the chickpeas.
4. Break up the biscuits in a food processor to fine crumbs, then add the chickpeas and try to process as finely as possible - this will likely require stirring help as there's not enough liquid to allow a smooth processing.
5. Stir in the onions, carrot, egg, paprika, salt and pepper and mix thoroughly.
6. Divide into 12 parts and roll to roundish patties. Dip into sesame seeds if you like.
7. Heat up a tbsp of the olive oil in a large pan and fry the first six, 2 - 3 minutes on each side, then place on the hot baking tray and finish baking in the oven. Repeat for the remaining six falafels.

First a word on the onions and carrot. The recipe stated "salad onions", but the supermarket used this term for both what I call salad onions:



and for what I normally would call spring onions - i. e. the green ones without big heads. And the recipe called for six as well as a carrot, which means the end result could be wildly different, so I weighed the onions and carrot I used.

As Lundulph is a carnivore, I fried some lovely Turkish garlic sausage to go with the falafels and served with a large lettuce leaf and some cherry tomatoes. The falafels tasted OK, though the texture wasn't quite right - it was too smooth for my liking. And mind you, I followed the instructions in the recipe and had tremendous trouble getting everything processed, it was just too thick. So next time, I'll make sure to chop things as finely as possible, rather than use my tiny food processor.

We also added a little piri-piri sauce, it seems we're in a mood for spicier foods lately and piri-piri is just so tasty. I would have preferred to incorporate this spiciness in the falafel mixture though.

I rolled the falafels in sesame seeds because I was worried they would stick together, however, this isn't necessary. Lundulph thought the sesame flavour dominated entirely. But they looked pretty and combined with the garlic sausage, flavours worked very nicely.

They were nice re-heated as well and I suspect would freeze well too. For my next attempt however, I'll aim for more texture. And I've already found a couple of rather interesting recipes.