Falafel I Have Known

One of the best things about warmer weather is simpler cuisine. The produce in our local grocery stores looking better by the week, and soon our favorite farm stand will overflow with beautiful local lettuces and vegetables. By the time summer arrives we’ll be making dinners of fresh corn on the cob, tomato slices, spicy mixed greens, and crusty bread. Sometimes I think food doesn’t get much better than that.

We have a vegetarian who lives with us part of each week; she’s also a finicky eater, which presents a challenge. David-the-Chef is also David-the-Dad, constantly trying to get the girl to step outside her comfort zone of pasta and red sauce, and its variant, cheese pizza. She eats salad, too. But whenever she announces she tried something new and liked it, David’s on it. Last weekend it was veggie burgers: good, she said, but she didn’t especially care for chunks of beans.

This in turn got me thinking about falafel, a favorite I haven’t had in a while. I ate it in college all the time, at a dive-y place near campus where my homies and I devoured falafel sandwiches made by people who knew how. We greedily swallowed the crispy bits and licked the white sauce from our fingers. It was cheap food, nourishing and sustaining.

Why don’t we have falafel? I asked. So on Sunday we bought a box of falafel mix (simplicity, remember: no scratch-made in this case, and the ingredients list passed the chef test). It was so good we had more last night, in each case on some flat bread (the store had no pita, for falafel’s sake), with a bountiful salad. We have not yet asked the girl to try it, because these things must be done delicately.

Next up: we’ll figure out how to make a slightly less fatty version of that intoxicating white sauce.

Bon appetit: we sure as heck did.

Salad Twosome