Denise Minger: Death By Food Pyramid, Women Who Gain Weight on Paleo, and How to Spot a Fraud. Special episode for you this week, folks. This is a selection adapted from first draft of my new book, The Wild Diet about 10 Hours on Tour with Tim McGraw & the.
![]() Food Timeline: cake history notes. Let's Make Delicious Falafel, Or Else! Here was a challenge: my wife had decided to host her staff of 1. Something to do with a training video and general good- vibe staff retreat benefits. They would need to eat food, of course, and herein lay the challenge: More than half of her staff members consider themselves vegans. Not pescatarians! Not vegetarians! No animal products, whatsoever. The staff had agreed, for the sake of convenience, that whatever was served should be appropriate for all of them, so they would all be going vegan that day. As a result, making something non- vegan and just leaving it to the shitty vegans to figure it out from there wasn’t even an option. My wife is a very busy person, and I am very much not, and so I was asked to prepare food for this group. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna stake my reputation as a host to a heap of roughage, though I did enjoy the idea of just leaving a head of cabbage on the dining room table with a pile of forks. No, I needed to do better than that. What I eventually came up with is falafel. Falafel is one of very, very few vegan food items that are vibrant and satisfying enough that we omnivores won’t just enjoy them, but will eat them hungrily and crave them. Falafel has it all: It’s filling, it’s rich, it’s assertive, it’s texturally interesting, and it can fill a sandwich, which is a basic requirement of any diet staple. During a very brief period in my early 2. I myself dabbled in vegetarianism, I made and ate an insane amount of falafel. It’s the kind of thing you carry with you when you leave the rabbit diet behind, because it’s delicious, and easy to make, and cheap, and good for you. It’s good food, is what I’m saying. Let’s make some, eh? ![]() Your shopping list is pretty simple: some garbanzo beans; some herbs; some spices; some garlic; some high heat oil; and some sandwich fixings. There are a couple of ways of doing this, because there are two ways of buying chickpeas: canned, in that weird bean juice; and dry (unless there is a third way I don’t know about—smoked? Do not buy jellied garbanzos.). In theory, canned beans are beans that have been preserved in exactly whatever post- raw state they are normally consumed. But the characteristics that might make a garbanzo bean work as part of a salad or a stew are not necessarily those that make them appropriate as the main ingredient in, say, hummus, or, more to the point, falafel. Case in point: A few weeks ago, when hosting this damn vegan staff meeting in my damn home, I took a first, practice swing at making falafel, using what I had on hand. And, of course, what I had on hand was a couple admittedly very, very old cans of chickpeas. Hey, this is convenient, I’ll just mash up these here canned chickpeas into delicious falafel for a happy crowd of grateful, appreciative guests. Ah, how naive I was back then. Here’s what happens when you make falafel out of canned chickpeas: because of the soft, soaked nature of canned chickpeas, the texture of the mashed chickpeas goes from smashed potatoes to hummus in precious few turns of the fork, so that what was on its way to being crumbly, moist falafel will instead be dense and sandy and not especially pleasant. Of course, you can do this with canned chickpeas, and it might turn out wonderful, but this is one of those times when opting for ingredients in their pre- convenience state will give you a far greater chance of winding up with a finished product you actually, you know, like to eat. And you do not want to be the omnivore serving garbage falafel to a room full of vegans. Violent, scary people, the vegans. So, on my doomed falafel practice run, I dumped all the shit I might want in my falafel into the trusty food processor, pulsed it a few times, looked upon the resulting mixture’s soft, fudge- like texture, thought huh, and started forming it into little balls. The fact that it was sticking to my fingers and palms like, well, fudge, should have told me everything I needed to know. Needless to say, the entire first batch, made of canned garbanzos, was trash. ![]() My previous commitment this evening was cancelled. Suddenly, I had an evening free to myself. What would I do with that time? The thought occurred to me: perhaps I. Good enough for a punishing meal with a gracious wife, but not remotely good enough for the vegans. You are not going to make the same mistakes I did on that first run. You are going to get yourself a bag of dried garbanzos, and do it right. First things first: get home, drop your dried chickpeas into a colander, and give them a quick rinse. Who knows how long these chickpeas have been sitting on the shelf at your grocery store, and who knows what frightening dust of the ancient world might be coating their pale skin. Here’s what’s gonna happen: the beans are gonna soak up that water, and as they do, they’re gonna expand, and you want to make sure there’s enough water in the bowl that they can double or even triple in size and still mostly be under water. When you’ve got the chickpeas situated in a some water in a bowl, sock the whole thing away in the fridge and go to bed. You’re gonna leave the chickpeas to soak overnight, so that when you open the fridge tomorrow morning, they look less like the dark, dry, bullet- hard pellets they were out of the bag, and almost like chickpeas you might’ve recently poured out of, yes, a can. Goddamn you for making me go through an overnight process to produce exactly the chickpeas you just got done telling me not to use. First of all, you were sleeping! Not a lot of hard work there, toughy. Second of all, the chickpeas in your fridge might look more- or- less like canned chickpeas, but I assure you they are quite different. To make this point, I urge you to go ahead and fire one of those chickpeas home. Oh, yeah, that’s not at all like a canned chickpea, because it’s still hard and brittle and, in fact, generally flavorless, you son of a bitch. Listen, asshole: An idea you’re gonna have to get used to, in cooking, is there are lots of cuisines where whole wide ranges of textures or flavor bases are made from foods that we goober Americans only think to use in limited ways. Yes, the chickpeas don’t taste like much. Neither does a handful of all- purpose flour! Also, you should stop eating handfuls of all- purpose flour, right away. Because the chickpeas are still kinda hard and brittle, instead of mushing into a sludge when they are compacted, they are going to crumble, and therefore patties or cute little balls made out of these compacted chickpeas will retain some crumbly texture and lightness, and you will enjoy eating them. Which brings us to the next step: strain the liquid out of the chickpeas and dump them into a food processor. Before we start pulsing, let’s address the flavor problem. A little salt will perhaps make plain chickpea sludge taste more chickpea- y, but I’m not sure that’s gonna make it a whole lot more delicious. I mean, even the best chickpea you ever ate was just a damn chickpea. Into the food processor you are going to add good- tasting and - smelling things: a small handful of fresh parsley, a small handful of fresh mint, a small handful of fresh cilantro, and a couple cloves of garlic. Really, you can fuck with this. Add some scallions if you want, or chives, or skip the parsley, or add dill. But add a bunch of whatever you’re using, you know? Like, your falafel paste should be green, and your finished falafel, when you bite into it, should reveal a hot, green interior. Also, go ahead and drop in a couple pinches of salt. Now you see: The chickpeas are there for substance and texture, but your falafel is going to be bright and herby and aromatic with the characteristics of other, better things. No offense, chickpeas. Now. You can pulse here, if you want. Your falafel will be delicious. But you’ve also got a whole cupboard of little spice bottles, and absolutely no one to stop you from going nuts. A classic combination would be cumin and coriander. I like a little smoked paprika, because I am increasingly incapable of cooking anything without putting some smoked paprika into it. You should feel free to add cayenne pepper, or hot or sweet paprika, or chili powder, or friggin’ sumac or turmeric or whatever you want dude! Add some spices to the food processor, because experimentation is fun and your falafel will still be delicious, in the end. For sure you are now ready to process all this shit. Don’t just pound down the ON button and go back to playing hours of video games, you slob. You want to process this stuff just long enough that the chickpeas are minced, and no longer. Pulse the food processor a few times, then use a rubber spatula to push the mixture down from the walls of the processor, then pulse some more. Repeat these steps a few times until you’ve got a course, sandy, green mixture in there. Smells good! It’s perfectly edible, and you should probably take a tiny taste of it, to see if it might benefit from another dash of salt or cumin or whatever. Try not to do much more pulsing, if you can get away with it—you were smart to go the dried chickpeas route, but you can still over- process this stuff and wind up with a chickpea smoothie and bad falafel. You want the mix to have the texture of ground up nuts, but not peanut butter, know what I mean? We’re close to cooking. Dump and spoon and in all other ways transport the falafel mixture out of the food processor and into a big bowl. Also, haul out a deep, heavy pot, pour a couple inches of high heat oil down in there, and set it over medium heat. Like fried plantains and fried eggplant (and unlike fried chicken and apple fritters), there won’t be any especially horrible consequences for getting the temperature of the oil a little bit wrong with this or that batch of falafel (more on this in a second). We want the oil to be hot enough that the balls don’t sit there, inert, soaking up oil, but not so hot that the outsides char by the time the insides have even started to heat up. That range is fairly broad, and forgiving. You’ll have some wiggle room, is what I’m saying.
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