The Finest Falafels

When faced with a dilemma, such as arriving home, starving, after a 5k running race with no dinner prepared and no tempting left-overs, nothing beats FALAFELS! These nifty little patties are scrumptious, easy and you probably have all the ingredients in your cupboard already. Plus with a team effort, we had these prepared cooked and on the plate in under 35minutes. And probably eaten in 40.

Here's what you need:

1 15oz. can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed (unless you like being gassy all night)

4 tbsp. olive oil

1 tsp. cumin

1/2 tsp. ground coriander

salt and pepper

1 medium yellow onion, diced

1/2 cup plain fine bread crumbs

Here's how you make them:

Preheat oven to 425 degress F

Use a food processor or hand blender to mash the chick peas, oil and spices into a chunky paste. Add the onions and breadcrumbs and blend until the texture can be easily formed into a patty. Add more bread crumbs if you need to. 

Form the mush into 1/2 inch thick patties and pan sear in oil over medium heat until nicely browned (2 ish minutes). Flip and do it again. Transfer falafels to a baking sheet and bake until heated through, about 5 minutes.

*Note: We used pre-Italian-spiced bread crumbs. The extra flavouring was nice but they were maybe a bit salty. We'd leave out the extra salt if using these crumbs again.

Falafel is Middle Eastern and is often eaten in schwarmas (an Ottawa fav) but we didn't have that stuff so we made in into a kind of Indian-Middle-Eastern fusion meal, by eating the falafels with naan and raita (yogurt dip that is eerily similar to tzatziki). As long as you're not an foreign food purist, you should love this combo!

Bradele.