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.

Sis and Mom were thrilled with the dinner party. “You can do this anytime,” they cooed conspiratorially, and they began plotting holiday schedules. “Thanksgiving, Christmas…no, Mom will still do Christmas…Easter….”

I hadn’t hosted an event of this magnitude before. A bit over a month ago my sponsor, Foodbuzz, contacted me with the offer to host a pasta and wine-pairing dinner party using free coupons supplied by Buitoni Riserva. That shit’s expensive, so I jumped at the chance.

the asparagus mistake

I picked up 5 packages each of fresh pasta agnolotti, which is is a jumbo half-moon shaped ravioli. One was wild mushroom, and I planned to toss it with roasted asparagus and chives, drizzle it with olive oil, and top it with freshly ground black pepper and goat cheese. Unfortunately, I didn’t consult my sister the asparagus roasting expert, and left it in the oven about 20 minutes instead of the 5 she said was correct, and the asparagus came out limp and mushy.

My aunt, Linda, brought over a bunch of chives she snipped from her patch, some blooming with crunchy-oniony flowers atop them. They were too pretty to ignore, so they got put out on the table.

The guest list: Mom and Dad, Jennifer and Dale Javier (he said he wanted to be called Javier), Mom’s best friend Leeann and her daughter (and my friend) Angie, and Linda. I asked Leeann which wine she wanted to drink. “Oh, I love all white wine,” she said, so I poured her the La Noble chardonnay I’d picked up and a teeny glass of fino. Fino is very dry sherry that I drank a lot in Spain and it always makes me think of briny olives, tapas, dancing sevillanas, and walking home through the Parque de María Luisa at seven in the morning.

Not everyone was into the wine thing, though. Dad and Javier mixed themselves up some massive bloody marys.

Check out this spread! Angie made that vibrant salad, Mom brought the relish tray, and there’s the wild mushroom agnolotti along with the four cheese (Quattro Formaggi) agnolotti, and the red sauce I mixed up for the latter.

where’s my two dollars?

There’s Linda and the view from the other side of the tablecloth. That’s right, tablecloth. Cloth napkins. Frawnch fries. Frawnch bread. Kwissssmassss. Pardon me, I’m channeling Better Off Dead.

The top is the wild mushroom agnolotti with the asparagus/chives/black pepper/olive oil/goat cheese topping I mentioned. The left/bottom is the four cheese agnolotti with a roasted red pepper and kalamata olive sauce, topped with fresh basil. And supposed to have grated parmesan on top, but I forgot to get it on there for the pic. That sauce was the bomb.

Jennifer posed for an action shot! You can see a glass of red wine, which would be the shiraz Angie brought. I’d originally planned on cabernet to pair with the wild mushroom agnolotti, but we ended up breaking that out later. The red paired really well with the four cheese as well. Personally, I drank a little of the chardonnay and the shiraz and liked them both with both pastas. Maybe I’m just easy. Don’t answer that.

Dad warned Javier early on, “You’re not going to be getting any meat here tonight.” Of course they were going through that theater to tease me, but their little plan backfired. They chowed down and made happy noises just as much as everyone else did.

Notice how I ran out of serving dishes and dug into the storage containers. I’m so not prepared for this big party thing.

bring out your desserts

Linda made the coolest. Dessert. Evar. Think peanut butter pound cake. Slice it. Spread with peanut buttercream and blackberry jam. Top with another slice of pound cake.

That’s right. Linda made pound cake pb&j. Awesome.

Jennifer dipped strawberries in chocolate and served them on an appropriately-themed playing cards plate. Did I mention this was dinner and games night?

Mom and Leeann have been best friends for like 40 years, since Leeann moved in next door to Mom and Dad. <suckup>Did I say 40? I meant 20, because they couldn’t be a day over 40 themselves.</suckup>

euchre tournament!

Time to get our game on. With 8 of us present, and everyone liking euchre, we drew numbers, paired up, and had a little euchre tournament. To my chagrin, I was paired with Dale Javier, but he only fucked up once so I didn’t get to yell at him.

Jennifer and Mom were the winning team (never put people with shared DNA on the same team) and suddenly when it was over people began joking, “Where are the prizes?”

“Prizes?” I said, and a light bulb went on. An opportunity to divest myself of some excess goods! I got out some packaged rice/pasta sides I’d been planning to hand off to Linda, some product samples I’d received randomly in the mail, and some decks of playing cards from an estate sale I went to last week. Jennifer chose this lovely rice side dish to take home with her.

For her parting gift, Angie selected “stars of country music” playing cards and some instant coffee samples.

Then we played Perudo, or Liar’s Dice, and after that midnight was approaching, so the parent types and Jennifer and Javier left before they all turned into pumpkins. This left Linda, Angie, Bill, and me, and we broke out the Pictionary.

how to draw siamese twins in pictionary

how not to win at ingenious

Even with the adults gone, the wine kept flowing. We finished the La Noble and the Oak Leaf shiraz. Then we finished the Red Truck varietal red, and broke into the Clos du Bois chardonnay and Ravenswood cabernet, and Linda finished her Funky Llama chardonnay.

Wits and Wagers made an appearance, and then we closed out the night with Ingenious. Angie couldn’t remember if she’d played before and Bill was new to Ingenious, so I played with a handicap — I picked my tiles to play randomly. I got trounced as the newbies quickly picked up on the strategy and scored one Ingenious after another. I’m never believing Cranky Angie again! (Cranky Angie: I don’t think I like this. I don’t know if I want to play this. I know and understand Cranky Angie, because Cranky Amy always makes an appearance with new games too.)

what did i learn from all this?

I can put on a grownup party.

I can sip wine without getting too drunk.

Having smokers around leads to more smoking.

The Buitoni Riserva pastas are really good. The Quattro Formaggi Agnolotti was the hands-down favorite.

Good wine goes with anything.

Euchre needs to be more than a regional game.

roasted red pepper and kalamata olive pasta sauce

This sauce was the hit of the party. Salty, piquant, and complex, it goes well with simple pastas like cheese ravioli or agnolotti. I hesitate to post it as a recipe because it’s so simple, but it’s so good that it must be shared.

1 (28 ounce) jar red pasta sauce, like marinara
1 small (7 ounce) jar roasted red peppers
¼ cup kalamata olives

Purée the roasted red peppers and kalamata olives in a blender. Pour sauce and pepper/olive purée into a 2-quart pan and warm over medium heat. Serve over pasta.

Hello, my pretties. We’ll be quick today in honor of tax season. I have a zillion e-mail records to go through (the bane of online work) and missing 1099s to calculate by hand. My tax preparer, who also happens to be my best friend from grade school, is in 90 degree-plus Virginia this week, so I really can’t say which of us has it worse.

This red wine tomato sauce recipe can be subbed for a jar of any red store-bought pasta sauce. I like to double or triple the recipe and freeze it because hey, if I’m going to the work of making my own sauce, I may as well have some for next time.

But is it really work? Chop an onion, press a few cloves of garlic, open a can of tomatoes, and do some measuring. Twenty minutes on the stove, and it’s done.

There’s a secret to this tomato sauce. Your omnivore friends will think it has meat in it. The trick is fennel. An earthy, tangy spice used to flavor sausage, fennel is the spice that makes us think “meat.”

What do I like to do with this versatile tomato sauce?

• use it in lasagna
• top pasta with it and sprinkle with Parmesan (obvious)
• use it in baked penne (recipe coming, ooh)
• add mushrooms to it
• add soy burger crumbles to it
• add chopped red or green pepper to it
• add soy sausage crumbles to it

I-can’t-believe-it’s-meatless tomato sauce will happily take anything you wish to add to it. Go make it if you have a chance. I have Paypal receipts to sort through.

i-can’t-believe-it’s-meatless tomato sauce

The recipe calls for a large can of whole tomatoes, briefly whirred in a blender. You could instead use a 28-ounce can of tomato puree (make sure it’s made from only tomatoes) or even diced or crushed tomatoes, according to your preference. The latter will be a chunkier sauce. Adapted from Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites: Flavorful Recipes for Healthful Meals.

Time: 45 minutes
Special equipment: blender (optional)

1 tablespoon olive oil (not EVOO)
1 cup finely chopped onion (1 medium onion)
¼ teaspoon salt
2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
2 teaspoons ground fennel
2 teaspoons Milford’s Buon Appetito Italian seasoning* or 1 teaspoon each dried oregano and dried basil
⅓ cup red wine
3 cups undrained canned tomatoes (28-ounce can)
½ to 1 tablespoon sugar
salt and pepper to taste

In a large saucepan, heat the olive oil on medium heat. Add the onions, sprinkle with salt, and sauté until soft, about 4 to 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

While the onions are cooking, whirl the tomatoes in a blender until just puréed and set aside.

When onions are soft, add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds.

Add the fennel, oregano and basil* and cook for another minute to coat the onions and garlic in the spices.

Pour in the red wine and bring to a boil. This will happen quickly, so have the puréed tomatoes handy, or have your canned purée, diced, or crushed tomatoes open and ready. Add tomatoes and sugar to the pan and mix well.

Cover and simmer gently for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Taste and season with salt and pepper to your preference.

* Just want to let you know that Milford Spice, a Michigan company, sent me a free sample of this seasoning. I also happen to dig it a lot.
** If using fresh herbs, use 1 tablespoon each of fresh oregano and basil and add them in the last couple minutes of cooking time.