Baked Falafel

Oh, falafel. I could sing its praises for a long time. It is tasty, vegetarian and often times vegan, portable, and really easy to make! I fell in love with falafel when I lived in Israel, since it is the primary fast food in the Middle East – move over, McDonald’s. Falafel is traditionally deep fried and accompanied by hummus and tahina sauce. In Israel, it is served in a pita pocket, making it an easily transportable, quick lunch.

If you plan on frying the falafel (which is easily done on the stovetop with olive oil) it is better to use dry chickpeas and soak them for 2 hours, up to overnight. Canned chickpeas are too soft and tend to fall apart during the frying process. Since this recipe is baking the falafel, either canned or soaked chickpeas may be used.

I have tried several different falafel recipes, but I found one from a fellow foodie who spent some time in Israel, and I thought her recipe was so close to authentic! I made a few changes, and came up with this healthy version of the tasty falafel.

Baked Falafel

adapted from theshiksa.com

makes 12 falafel discs, serves 3-4

1C chickpeas, rinsed

1 small onion

1/2C spinach leaves

1/2C parsley leaves

3 garlic cloves

1T flour (I used spelt to keep these gluten free)

1t salt

1t cumin

1/2t ground coriander

1 pinch of cayenne

1 pinch of ground cardamom

Freshly ground pepper to taste

1/2t baking powder (to help them rise with the lack of gluten)

For falafel sandwiches:

Pitas

Hummus

Tahina Sauce

Chopped tomato

Spinach or lettuce

Chopped cucumber

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Assemble all falafel ingredients in a food processor.  Parsley:

Spinach & spices:

Baking Soda:

Roughly chopped onion:

Flour:

And Chickpeas:

Pulse until a course meal is formed. I personally don’t like my falafel to be the texture of baby food.

I used a cookie dough scooper -which to you might be a melon baller- to form the falafels on a baking sheet.

Bake for 15 minutes, then flip and bake 15 minutes on the other side. Due to the baking nature, the falafels will only be crispy on the sides that touch the pan. Though you could probably bake them and maintain a round shape, I chose to smash them and make them discs for ease.

Serve them hot with either hummus or tahina or both, or in a pita as a sandwich.  I slathered my pita with hummus (see my recipe link above), stuffed it with falafel, spinach, tomato, and tahina sauce (recipe also above.)  Or they’re delicious on their own, served with a traditional Israeli Salad.  Yum!!

Here’s a picture that I took in Israel of a postcard.  The recipe is pretty close!

Israeli Tahina

Here’s a basic recipe composed of what I could remember from my Israeli cookbook that got lost in one of my house moves.  This thin, white sauce is a tart/tangy condiment that is designed to be paired with falafel.  Though many people use it to accompany hummus and other dishes, I love to pair this with falafel.  Bonus, it is vegan and gluten free, which in my book means you can have as much of it as you want!

Most recipes you’ll find entitle this “Tahini Sauce” to differentiate it from “tahini paste” (ground sesame seeds,) but I distinctly remember it being referred to in Israel as “Tahina” (pronounced tuh-(c)hee-na with a little back of the throat action on the hee part.)

Tahina Sauce

makes 1 Cup

1/2C Tahini paste

2/3C Water

Juice of 1 lemon

2-3 Garlic cloves

Handful of parsley

Salt to taste

1/2t Dill, optional

Combine all ingredients in a food processor or blender and process until smooth.

At this point, taste and adjust as necessary. Mine needed more salt to bring out the flavor, and more water to reach the desired consistency. Tahina sauce should be thicker than water, but thinner than tahini paste.

Enjoy with some yummy falafel!

Johnny Marzetti

Sometimes you just need some comfort food. It was my birthday a few weeks ago and I was thinking a lot about my family. Growing up, this recipe was a favorite of mine, served up by my Polish grandmother. She is one of my heroes. She survived both the Great Depression & World War II as a slave in Germany, her love story with my Grampa is Oscar worthy, she taught herself English by reading magazines, and raised four great children, the oldest of whom was my dad. Whenever I visited she would always pull me up in her lap, tell me how beautiful I was, and give me a dollar or two (which was a lot to her) so I could have my own spending money. So, yes this meal is pretty basic, but when you’ve got all that history in some food, it makes it that much more special.

This is Johnny Marzetti. It began during World War II at a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, where my grandparents lived after the war. I suppose it was an easy, relatively affordable way to feed people so I easily see how my grandmother picked up on it with six mouths to feed. From what I’ve read online, Johnny Marzetti is traditionally baked and made with red sauce, but I made this one on the stove top like Grandma did. She made both red & white sauce versions, but this time I decided to tackle the white sauce. Though Grandma never used recipes or had anything written down, my uncle told me what he could remember, and I added a few adaptations of my own to make this rendition a bit healthier.  I’ll let you know when I conquer the red sauce.

Johnny Marzetti
Serves 6-8

12oz elbow macaroni
12oz ground soy crumbles or ground beef
1 yellow onion
1 can of cream of mushroom soup
2C milk
1C grated Parmesan, plus more for garnish
Salt & pepper to taste
1T olive oil, if using soy crumbles
Parsley for garnish, optional

So my grandmother’s way was to use Kraft macaroni & she included the cheesy powder in her recipe. Not that you can knock anyone’s grandmother’s cooking (was that even English?!) but I really try to cook with whole foods that are as natural as possible, so cheese powder was out for me. But, I glanced over the Kraft box and besides crazy stuff, it was mostly milk based, so I figured, why not actually add milk to the recipe?

So I set the macaroni to boil

while I chopped the onion.

Since I didn’t have to cook any meat, I mostly browned the onion and heated the soy crumbles. Since soy doesn’t have the grease that meat does, I added the olive oil to help keep everything from sticking to the pan. If you use ground beef, cook it with the onions. Once browned, drain the grease off before adding the other ingredients.

Cook the macaroni only for about 5 minutes, drain and rinse the starch off

then add it to the meat mixture.

Add the cream of mushroom soup and stir well.

Stir in the milk, salt, and pepper, and simmer for 10 minutes.

After simmering, add the Parmesan cheese and stir until it’s melted in.

Serve immediately, garnishing with Parmesan and parsley.

Comfort food at its finest. If you add a sunset, it makes it that much more perfect.

Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream

I love children. And I love ice cream. So, when my sweet niece – well, I’ve adopted her as my niece since my siblings only produce boys – had a Strawberry Shortcake birthday party, who was I to deny myself her some strawberry ice cream?

I’ve made ice cream before, once, and it was vegan and made without an ice cream maker. We were so hungry we didn’t even wait for it to freeze up all the way. After reading a few blogs on the differences in the process of making it with & without a machine, it just saves a lot of labor time with it. So for this special event I actually bought a cheapie ice cream maker and was not disappointed. If you don’t have an ice cream maker, no need to fear, because I’ll guide you through it.

It’s super yummy, creamy, and was a huge hit at the birthday party for children & adults alike. Not gonna lie, this isn’t the healthiest version of ice cream you’ll find, but I at lease reduced the amount of sugar so the faint sweetness doesn’t knock you into sugar-coma. Now that I’ve conquered this and know how easy it is, I’ll experiment with other healthy but still tasty alternatives.

Strawberry Ice Cream
Adapted from chefinyou.com
makes 5 quarts

2 lbs ripe strawberries

4 C cream

2 C milk

1.5 C sugar, divided

1 T vanilla

1 t salt

Wash and dry the berries, cut off the tops and any funny white or green spots. You want ripe, sweet berries for the best flavor. 1 pound of berries I cut in half and set aside to purée them. The other half was roughly chopped to be bits in the ice cream. If the ice cream won’t be eaten within a day or so, I would purée all the berries. If left in the freezer for an extended time they become rock hard and acquire a funny flavor.

After the berries are cut & in their respective bowls, sprinkle a 1/4 cup of sugar in each bowl and let them sit for at least 10 minutes. When my mom did this when I was little, the sugar drew out the juices of the strawberries making a syrup, but since I used vegan cane sugar this actually didn’t happen the way I thought it would. If you use regular sugar, you’ll get the syrupy results, if not, you’ll at least sweeten the berries a little bit and that will still help.

In a large bowl whisk together the milk,

the remaining cup of sugar,  salt,

and vanilla.

Slowly whisk in the cream last – you don’t want to make whipped cream.

Once everything is fully incorporated, purée the berries.

Add the purée to the rest of the ingredients and slowly add in all the berries – purée & pieces.

Chill for at least 1 hour in the fridge.  After its chilled, make the ice cream according to your makers instructions. With such a great quantity, the ice cream maker should churn for at least 45 minutes. If it were a smaller portion, 20-30 minutes should suffice.

If you do not have an ice cream maker, skip the fridge step and put the cream mixture in a sealed container in the freezer.  Remove every hour for 4-6 hours and mix with an electric mixer to break up the ice cream.  This is the hand version of what the ice cream maker is churning.

This is how mine turned out after 45 minutes of churning.

It turned out pretty soft even after 45 minutes.  If you like soft serve style, though, it’s great just like this!

However, I knew this wouldn’t work with 3-year-olds, so I divided the ice cream into several plastic containers and froze the mixture for 4 hours. It was perfect at the party!!!

Here’s the 3-year-old birthday princess!

Tangy Vinaigrette Chopped Salad

Years ago I cruised to the Bahamas with my husband and some close friends.  While ashore, we dined in the Atlantis Hotel at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill restaurant.  I fell in food-love!  Not only was the restaurant gorgeous itself, but the food presentation and flavor was unlike anything I’d ever seen or tasted.  Perhaps this would be a good time to mention that the small town I live in only has a Chili’s and an Outback….ahem.  Moving on.  I loved the style of food at the Mesa Grill which is perfectly described as “explosive flavor from the southwestern kitchen.”  I could eat quesadillas every day, so when I ordered the Smoked Black Bean & Corn Quesadilla with Avocado and Toasted Garlic Creme Fraiche I was in quesadilla Heaven.  The way Chef Flay combines spicy chilies with sweet notes in his food instantly made me a fan.  I talked about it so much that one Christmas, my sweet mother & father-in-loves (yeah, better than in-laws!) bought me the Mesa Grill cookbook!  I was ecstatic!

Though several recipes are quite fancy – as in, I’d never have the guts to cook, or eat, duck – there are many that I’ve made several times for both casual dinners and special occasions.  This salad is so simple, yet delicious!  The secret is how you make the dressing.  Now, I respect a chef. But, there’s still something in me that urges me to try things a different way.  So, normally I don’t mess with a good thing, but this is my interpretation of Chef Flay’s “Sophie’s Chopped Salad.”

And yes, maybe I am referring to him as Chef Flay just in case he reads this and wants to hire me.

Tangy Vinaigrette Chopped Salad

adapted from Bobby Flay

Serves 4-6

For the vinaigrette you’ll need:

1/4 C balsamic vinegar

1T Dijon mustard

1t salt

1/2 t pepper

1 C canola oil, divided in half

For the salad you’ll need:

3 C chopped romaine lettuce

2 ripe tomatoes of your choice seeded and diced

1/2 C canned kidney beans, drained and rinsed

1/2 C canned garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed

1/2 C chopped stems of scallions

3/4 C 1/2-inch-cubed white Cheddar cheese

3/4 C 1/2-inch-cubed Monterey Jack cheese

4-6 corn tortillas

With a salad like this, you really don’t need to measure the ingredients exactly, you just want an even blend of the beans, cheeses, tomato, and scallions.  No worries if the measurements aren’t perfect.

After washing and drying the veggies, chop the lettuce to bite size pieces.

Next, add the beans and cheeses!  Try not to eat too many on their own.  I know it’s tough.

Chop the scallions.  I only used the green parts because though I love onion, I didn’t want that to be the predominant flavor of the salad.

And the tomatoes.  I waited to put them in the bowl until after the vinaigrette and tortillas were ready so their juices didn’t run around all cray cray.

Now it’s time for the vinaigrette!  This is one of the first home-made salad dressings I tackled, and it showed me there’s no need to be intimidated by salad dressings!  They’re not too hard to pull off.  This one can be made in a blender, in a bowl with a wisk, or as I did, in a small food processor.

Add salt & pepper,

Dijon mustard,

And add the vinegar.

Blend together until smooth.

Once it’s all blended slowly add 1/2 cup of oil to the mix.  If using a whisk, this will be easy, and if your food processor has an opening on top this will be easy.  Since mine does not, I would stop, add a little then blend.  Stop, add a little more then blend, and so on until all the oil had been encorporated.  This is the tricky part!  I’ve made this dressing before and once I dumped the oil in all at once and it did not blend correctly and separated afterwards.  It wasn’t right.  Make sure you add the oil slowly a little bit at a time.

When it’s done right, you get this!

The last component to this delicious salad is the crispy element.  Heat the remaining oil on medium-high heat.  Once the oil is ready, lightly fry both sides of each tortilla.

Once all tortillas are finished, add the tomatoes to the salad and mix well.  Plating is fun since the tortillas acts as a “plate.”  The tortillas tear easily with the fork to add a bit of crunch in the salad.  Garnish with freshly ground black pepper, dried parsley, or anything else you’d like!  It’s soooo delicious.  This might just become your new favorite salad.