Some Damn Good Falafel

SOMETIME around the age of ten or so I had a vague ambition to become a chef. Nothing ever came of that vague ambition, although today I do still enjoy spending time in the kitchen and giving the odd recipe a whirl. If I woke up to find that from now on an extra ten hours would be tacked on to each new day, I'd probably resolve to devote about two of them to more culinary experiments.

My skills in this area are about on a par with my talent for gardening. That is to say, on occasion I get lucky and whatever whim I've yielded to turns out well, but most of the time whatever I've baked, fried, mixed, sautéed or steamed doesn't quite look or taste like the cookbook said it was going to.

Today it was both disaster and delight. The hummus recipe I was following called for chickpeas, as you might expect, but it failed to mention cooked chickpeas. So I took about a pound of soaked-but-not-boiled chickpeas, added just the right amount of tahini, fresh lemon juice, olive oil and minced garlic, and then plunged in my electric mixer, ultimately creating an unpleasantly gritty, bitty paste with only the faintest hint of hummus flavor. Adding boiling water and microwaving the concoction after the fact did in fact smooth out the texture to something more palatable, but it also changed the consistency in ways that I wouldn't quite describe as spreadable.


My wife hit on the idea that hummus shares many of its ingredients with falafel and suggested that the industrial glue I'd created be repurposed, or less euphemistically, salvaged. In went some diced onion, chopped parsley, and crushed cumin and coriander seeds. I wadded it into walnut-sized balls and dropped them into frying oil. (Well, that's not entirely correct. First I dropped them into some beef fat that I'd been saving in the fridge. Beef fat, however, is apparently not ideal for this sort of deep-fat frying, and the first few wads of falafel just dissolved.)

What emerged, eventually, was some of the tastiest falafel I've ever eaten. Damn good falafel, if I do say so myself. To paraphrase Robert Penn Warren: "Out of culinary mishaps shall come forth deliciousness."