“Naw, I don’t need anything,” I said.

Linda and I were in Panini’s Deli, a sandwich shop right in the middle of the Discount Health Foods store. I’d link you but, you know, they’re too cool to have a website. We were eating the best sandwiches you can find in this godforsaken restaurant desert of a town, but that doesn’t do them justice. These sandwiches are the bomb, made with fresh, semi-trendy ingredients like red pepper alioli or basil pesto mayo, with several vegetarian sandwiches that — surprise! — aren’t all variations of “avocado, tomato and bean sprouts.”

Surrounding it is one of the two best health food stores in the region, complete with an awesome bulk foods and bulk spice section. Linda was asking if I wanted to do any shopping.

There had to be something. There is always something I want/need from the health food store. I get all my spices there now. They’re cheaper —less than half the cost usually — and even fresher than you find in the supermarket. But for the life of me, nothing sprung to mind. We finished noshing our awesomewiches and took off, emptyhanded.

That was yesterday.

Today, I go to make some Old Bay seasoning (don’t ask; it’ll bore you to death and I have to get to my point here sometime). It has cardamom in it.

Cardamom.

Oh, yeah, that spice I love. That spice I ran out of a few weeks ago. That spice I made a mental note to buy when I next went to the health food store.

KHAAAAANNNNNN!

muskrat love

They sure look ugly coming out of the oven!

I didn’t even tell you that story in order to tell you this one. I just told it to remind everyone to keep your shopping lists handy. :p

And this story is just about a yummy veggie burger that I love. I like that, even though it has bread crumbs, which I consider filler, it doesn’t go nuts with them and it still is full of wholesome stuff like green pepper, hot sauce, onions, and of course, black beans. I also love that it stays the heck together. Lots of homemade burgers don’t. It’s like, the nearly-unattainable goal of all veggie burgers: stay together. Like muskrats. Muskrats in love.

Yummy Black Bean Burgers

In my search for good veggie burger recipes, the hardest part is finding burgers that actually stick together! This recipe for black bean veggie burgers stays together very well and has a great Mexican kick to it too. Just be sure to make the ingredients as dry as you can before mixing: pat dry the beans, and strain or pat the green pepper and onion. If you don’t have a food processor, mash the beans with a fork or potato masher, and cut up the green pepper, onion and garlic very finely. I actually haven’t tried this without a food processor so if you do, report back, soldier! Adapted from allrecipes.com

Yield: 4 large patties or 6 to 8 smaller patties
Oven: 375°F
Special equipment: A food processor makes it much easier!

1 (15 ounce) can (1½ cups) black beans, drained, rinsed and patted dry.
½ green bell pepper, cut into 2 inch pieces
½ onion, cut into wedges
3 cloves of garlic, peeled
1 egg
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon cumin
1 teaspoon Thai chili sauce (can also use any hot sauce)
½ cup bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 375°F and oil a baking sheet or line with parchment or a silicone baking mat (like a Silpat).

Add beans, green pepper, onion, and garlic to your food processor. Pulse until veggies are finely chopped and beans are pasty, but not quite puréed. In a large bowl, whisk together egg, chili powder, cumin, and Thai chili sauce. Add bean and veggie mixture and mix well. Finally, stir in bread crumbs. If mixture is not thick enough to form patties (it should be), add more bread crumbs.

Take a look at your buns and make your patties about the same size. Big, round, luscious buns require bigger patties, of course. Small, firm buns need small patties. There are zero sexual innuendos in this paragraph.

Put the patties on your prepared baking sheet, and bake at 375°F for 20 minutes total: 10 minutes on one side, flip, 10 minutes on the other side.

Helen: Hmm, Pita. Well, I don’t know about food from the Middle East. Isn’t that whole area a little iffy?
Hostess: [laughs] Hey, I’m no geographer. You and I — why don’t we call it pocket bread, huh?
Maude: [reading the ingredients list] Umm, what’s tahini?
Hostess: Flavor sauce.
Edna: And falafel?
Hostess: Crunch patties.

Courtesy The Simpsons Archive.

For this (mostly) vegetarian, the second Project Food Blog challenge actually posed several small challenges. It’s called, “The Classics,” and it asks, “Any food blogger worth their salt can make a classic dish sing, but can they go outside their comfort zone and tackle a foreign cusine?”

One problem was that most cultures’ emblematic dishes are meat-based, and I wanted to remain as faithful to whatever recipe I chose as possible. Also, I live in…the boonies. Flyover country. BFE. While it’s possible to source many unusual ingredients, it can become very time-consuming driving across several counties to charming hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop shops and whoa, is that a Vietnamese market?

*shakes head* Okay, I’m back now. So anyway, one thing we don’t have in Project Food Blog is time.

how to decide?

I agonized. I researched world cuisines to see what unfamiliar cultures made. It was mainly meat, or used ingredients I wouldn’t be able to source out here on the Prairie Farm.

I toyed with the idea of baking a country’s signature dessert. As much as it appealed to me, it seemed too easy, too comfortable — I really enjoy baking.

I should have just lied and baked something.

Friends and family were helpful. Do empanadas. Remember how we ate empanadas at that little restaurant at Ground Zero on our vacation. Do pasties, a Yooper classic by way of Cornwall. Do gyoza. There was a definite meal-in-a-pocket theme.

And then there was the try-something-crazy theme. Do lutefisk, natto, garum.

Well, they tried.

I made a spreadsheet. I listed the candidates. I scored them on originality, authenticity, photogenic-ness. Shush. I know I’m a geek.

I wanted a good story. All my food stories seemed so pedestrian, boring, common.

ding ding ding

Throughout it all, I kept telling my friends and family about Middle Eastern food. How, in Chicago, I had literally six Middle Eastern restaurants and three Middle Eastern bakeries within a two-block radius of my apartment. A light supper on the way home from work was stopping at one of the bakeries after getting off the el and picking up a few spinach-and-feta pies or a falafel sandwich.

Whenever people came to visit, I took them to the Middle Eastern restaurants, especially Andie’s after it expanded and remodeled, because they could eat meat to their heart’s content and I could get falafel, eggplant mousaka, couscous, and more.

In some restaurants, the owners greeted us by name. One had a traditional seating area with pillows on the floor and hookahs you could try. Friends and I would stumble to one or another restaurant after an evening out for an appetizer and a nightcap, or make it the start of an evening.

Falafel was so ubiquitous, so cheap, and so readily available that I had no need or reason to learn how to make it. I lived in falafel heaven.

Then, of course, I moved to BFE. The nearest falafel was 30 miles away. Sadface.

In the end, after all this agonizing, falafel was the clear choice. My pedestrian, boring, common meal wasn’t so common for me any longer, so might not others find it unique as well? What’s normal to me would surely be new to…someone at least.

Besides, it was incredibly daunting. Grinding chickpeas? Deep-frying? I don’t deep fry! How the hell was I going to make those little balls stick together? Definitely out of my comfort zone.

the falafel recipes

Things I quickly learned in my search for falafel recipes:

1. Falafel is made from uncooked, soaked chickpeas. Canned beans will not do. It’s possible to make a facsimile of falafel with canned beans, but they are so wet that one has to add a lot of binder (flour or potato) to get them to stick together, rendering falafel-style hush puppies.

2. Egyptians make falafel with a combination of chickpeas and fava beans, or sometimes with all fava beans. I made mine with chickpeas only.

3. There are as many recipes for falafel as there are falafel shops in Chicago.

In the name of science, I tried two falafel recipes. One by Mark Bittman, who admittedly I often have trouble with, and one by a charming crazy Iraqi named Moti.

The nice thing about falafel is, it can all be mixed up in a food processor. The traditional, and preferred method is to use a meat grinder, but who has one of those lying around?

Oh, me. I do. No, I used a food processor instead. That thing up there? It weighs a ton!

They were both good recipes. The recipe here is my mishmash between the two.

can you quick soak beans for falafel?

One forum post said you could get away with quick soaking the beans (Bring to a boil, then remove from heat, cover and sit for an hour).

Two other sites said the slow soak was the only way and quick soaking would ruin the beans/falafel.

What’s the verdict? I made the Mark Bittman falafel using quick-soaked beans. Moti falafel was made using overnight-soaked beans. Both came out great.

So, yes, Virginia, you can quick soak garbanzo beans for falafel. Yay!

In the end, falafel is quite easy, as long as you have a deep fryer and plan to make it a day ahead of time (or are prepared to spend the time doing a quick soak). The worst part is making the balls themselves. They’re very messy and crumbly and you worry they will fall apart. Every other part of the recipe, though, is a breeze. I hope you try them sometime!

I’ve also included a recipe for flavor tahini sauce for the sandwich. Tahini itself is just a nut butter — it’s like peanut butter, but with sesame seeds. If you add some lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper, and yogurt if you like to tahini, and thin it with some water, you have a great dip or nutty mayonnaise substitute.

falafel (crunch patties)

prep: 12–24 hours (5 minutes active time)
active time: 1 hour
special equipment: food processor

1 cup dry chickpeas
1 small onion or ½ large onion, quartered
5 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
⅛ teaspoon ground cayenne (hot) pepper, or to taste (both recipes had more than this)
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro
1½ teaspoons lemon juice
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ cup flour, either garbanzo flour or all-purpose flour (optional; use garbanzo for gluten-free)
oil for frying

A day ahead:

Put chickpeas in a bowl and cover with 2–3 inches of water. Let soak overnight, the longer the better, up to 24 hours. Check periodically to see if you need to add more water.

Now to mix up the falafel!

Heat oil in a deep pot or deep fryer to 375°. While the oil is heating, mix up the falafel.

Drain the soaked chickpeas. You’ll have about 2 cups.

Put them in the bowl of the food processor, along with the onion, garlic, cumin, coriander, salt, pepper, cayenne, parsley, cilantro, lemon juice and soda. I tried one version without lemon juice and the boy thought something was missing. Grind and mix by pulsing, stopping once in a while to scrape down the sides. You don’t have to stop very often; I found that everything was mixing pretty uniformly on its own. Just make sure not to mush everything up completely. The beans should be in small niblety chunks, like sprinkles. Mmm, sprinkles.

Now, you could stop right here if you wanted to for the most pure falafel. If you’d like a little bit of help binding things together, add the flour and stir or pulse it all together. To be honest, I didn’t find the flour to help all that much to make the raw falafel feel like it held together better, but it did allow me to make bigger balls that held together, so I do suppose it helps.

If you don’t want to make the falafel right away, you could refrigerate the mixture for up to a day. Moti says that refrigerating at least 2 hours helps the falafel stick together better. I tried this and found it to behave the same whether fresh-mixed or whether chilled.

Now for the messy part!

Take a tablespoonfull of the falafel mix and make a ball of falafel in your hand. It will not want to stick together. I’m warning you right now. Just keep squeezing and pressing and molding for a few seconds and quickly you’ll have a ball that’s just holding together. Set this in the pan or in the deep fry basket. I used a Fry Baby and it made things so much easier. You will get lots of falafel bits sticking to your hands. Make several ping pong- to golf-sized balls, and fry for 2–3 minutes. Remove from oil and set on cutting board or paper towels.

tahini sauce (flavor sauce)

½ cup tahini
½ cup plain yogurt (omit for vegan sauce; it’s still wonderful)
juice of 1 lemon
1 clove garlic, mashed
salt and pepper to taste
water

Whisk together tahini, yogurt, lemon juice, and garlic. This mixture will be quite thick. Thin with water to desired consistency, or don’t thin at all if you don’t want to! Add salt and pepper to taste. Use as a dipping sauce, or in place of mayonnaise, or as a spread in falafel sandwiches.

To make a falafel sandwich from a thick pita, spread the inside of a pita with tahini sauce. Place 3 or however many balls you want of falafel in the pocket. Add sliced or diced tomato, cucumber, pickled turnip or pickled vegetables, lettuce, sliced sweet red pepper, and/or whatever sandwich fixins you enjoy. With thin pitas, roll like a burrito.

a vote for shiny cooking is a vote for kitten power

If you enjoyed this post, please vote for Shiny Cooking to continue onward in the Project Food Blog competition! Out of 400 competitors, 200 move on to round 3, and everyone gets 200 votes to cast! If you can spare a vote for me, I will truly appreciate it.

Neat, this made Foodie Views of the day! They gave me a pretty button to go with it:

Have I ever mentioned that the last thing I gave up when going vegetarian was bacon? Beef: I never liked it anyway. Nearly the same with chicken. Fish: next to last. I like me some canned tuna.

I’m not going to wax poetic about bacon, though. That’s so 2008. Are you as tired as I am of candied bacon, bacon smoothies, bacon popcorn, and bacon ice cream? I’m sure they’re wonderful, but all of the swooning over bacon is becoming a tad unseemly. Let’s be seemly, shall we?

Suffice to say bacon tastes good and its namesake sandwich, the BLT, is too. The salty bacon, the pretty ruffles of leaf lettuce, the earthy, full flavor of heirloom tomato slices — slap them between a few slices of toast slathered with a condment of your choice, usually mayonnaise, and you have one mother of a sandwich.

Everyone knows how to make a BLT.

But have you ever had one with basil-garlic mayonnaise?

It elevates the humble BLT to a thing of beauty. The fresh basil complements the tomato, the garlic enhances the bacon, and a few drops of hot pepper sauce add little heat but a lot of flavor.

Now, the nice people at Nature’s Pride sent me a couple loaves of bread: 12-grain and 100% whole wheat. Since they sent me free stuff, I’m likely to say nice things about it, so be forewarned. They make their bread with all natural ingredients and no HFCS, which is a big plus for me. When my cousin and I were making the sandwiches, he asked what kind of bread I had, and stipulated, “No whole wheat.” I gacked, because I don’t keep anything but whole wheat around. He had to get whole grains anyway, in the form of the 12-grain loaf.

He survived, and said the 12-grain was really good. Whether he was being polite or not I’m not sure. Either way, I don’t care. My sandwich got validation.

Mine was on whole wheat. It was quite tasty as well. We used Black Krim heirloom tomatoes from my garden, and some really lovely curly generic leaf lettuce from the store. It was quite tasty as well. I have to say that overall, I prefer the bread I make myself, but if I had to buy some, I would choose this Nature’s Pride stuff. Again, remember, I’m predisposed to being nice about the bread though.

basil-garlic mayonnaise

1 cup fresh basil, coarsely chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon salt
dash or two of tabasco or other hot pepper sauce
3/4 cup mayonnaise

In a food processor, whirl the basil leaves and garlic until the basil is finely chopped. Add salt, hot pepper sauce, and mayonnaise. Pulse until mixed together. Chill 30 minutes to allow flavors to meld.

basil-garlic mayonnaise BLT

Black Krim is a Russian heirloom variety tomato. It’s considered a beefsteak, but the tomatoes are smallish, about 2-1/2 to 3 inches in diameter. They have a rich flavor, not quite as “smoky” as some of the other black varieties, but more robust-tasting than most reds. I love growing them; like Stupice, they’re the perfect size for a sandwich, and they grow perfectly round and nearly blemish-free. They grow well in cooler climates like we have here in Michigan — it’s one of the few varieties I got a good number of tomatoes off of this cold summer.

4 slices whole grain bread, toasted
4 slices of cooked bacon
2 Black Krim tomatoes
2 large leaves curly leaf lettuce
basil-garlic mayonnaise (recipe above)

Slice the Black Krims. You should get 4 slices from each tomato, about 3/8″ thick. Slather basil-garlic mayonnaise on the toast. Build the BLT in layers: first, break the bacon into halves, laying out 4 halves on the bread. Then add the tomato slices, and the leaf lettuce on top of that. This ought to provide some decent protection for the bread from the tomato’s juices.

Top with the other slice of bread, cut sandwich in half, and serve.