vol. 5: falafel
a dish best served fried
The best revenge really is living well. Not that I’m a vengeful person exactly, but I’m definitely someone often consumed by l’esprit de l’escalier — the French for only realizing what you should have said when you reach the bottom of l’escalier, the staircase, after you’ve left the party. If I had just had a witty and cutting answer to everyone who’s ever wronged me, I’d be in a different position. In a year when there’s not much else to do but ruminate, I find myself unexpectedly thinking of these times. When I lost an argument, or when someone was carelessly cruel to me and I had nothing to say in return, or when I was cruel to someone else. Ancient history, in some cases, that I’m still packing up in the suitcase of my brain, only for the suitcase to spring open on me at the bottom of the stairs.
Because I’m deeply interested in the ways our society functions (or fails to), I have noticed that this self-absorbed rumination about other people is also bubbling up in others’ hearts during the pandemic. Another famous phrase from the French, after all, is “hell is other people.” Some people experience this uncomfortable state of being by exacting their lack of power on the powerless - screaming at service workers, for example. Some of us have turned inward as we stay in, and have become obsessive about the moral quality of our own behavior. Some of us take to the beaches or Disneyland to escape. Narcissism runs rampant, and we mistake it for power.
As a teenager and young adult, l’esprit de l’escalier consumed me, and while I can’t claim to have become “chill” in my 30s, I’ve mellowed considerably. What helped me most was, frankly, going to therapy — especially group therapy. Faced with the anxieties of other college-aged women, the most important lesson I learned was that no one is ever thinking about you as much as you are. That stupid thing you said, that thing that happened to you - no one really cares except you. In fact, most people are always thinking about themselves, too. This could maybe make you feel lonely or a little angry, but it’s empowered me. When you feel like you have very little control over your life, you have control and power in letting go of the past. There is real freedom in understanding what motivates other people, and our lack of control over their inner workings, and getting through our problems with them anyway.
Thus, back to revenge. It’s tempting to always want to march right up that staircase back into the party, to take your enemies by the ear and push them down those same stairs. It’s important instead to turn the sharp edges of that feeling into something new, something productive. This is a way to think about making food, too: you can cook when you’re mad or when you feel like the world belongs to your enemies. You can feed your body and spirit anyway. Fuck ‘em. Cultivate that feeling of living well once, and you’ll want to keep doing it. Hope you’ll do it along with us this week. See you soon, r
For much of my life, I was a very serious vegetarian. One thing that always irked me was the sort of vegetarian cooking that focused on attempting to replicate fast food grotesqueries or other meaty dishes. Fake meat has come a long way in the last couple of years, but does anyone really want to eat the same Beyond Burger with seitan bacon and Daiya cheese at every restaurant? So many of the most delicious, most flavorful foods on earth are already vegetarian or even vegan. While these days I eat fish a few times a week (and will occasionally sneak a few bites of red meat, like our pal Alec’s incredible brisket at Passover this week), I still have a real interest in vegetarian cooking.
When someone asked if we would ever share a vegan recipe in TIS, I racked my brain to think of my favorite vegan dish. With the anniversary of the first COVID lockdown just passing, I was also thinking about where I was when things started getting out of control. The first week of March 2020, as we were all coming to grips with the extent and the dangers of the pandemic, I was in the worst possible place: on a work trip to New York to be trained in a bunch of new tasks that I would never need to know for a job that would soon not exist in an industry that may never recover.
While I sat plugging away at spreadsheets in my hotel room in Gramercy Park, I would daydream about what I would eat later that night. On Super Tuesday, before ill-advisedly piling into a since-closed bar in Crown Heights to watch the disastrous results roll in, I made the trek out to Queens to visit The King of Falafel. It was, without a doubt, the best falafel I’ve ever had. This recipe is a tribute to that meal, one of the last times I ate in a restaurant. You don’t need cashew yogurt or seitan, or any other sleight of hand - some of the best foods on earth are already vegan.
You can really easily turn half of the tahini sauce into baba ganoush. Place a large eggplant directly over your stove’s flame and turn it until all of the skin is burnt to a crisp. Wrap the eggplant in foil until it is cool enough to handle, and remove the skin. Purée the eggplant into a half cup of the sauce, and add salt to taste.
This recipe is the result of some trial and error. I thought I had my recipe set, but when I tried to replicate it for dinner earlier this week, I wasn’t thrilled with the results. A lot of falafel recipes swear by the inclusion of baking soda, baking powder, or both to produce a fluffier interior. I’ve now nixed both, as I found it was making the fritters brown too quickly and making them take on a very dark look before they had achieved any real crunch in the oil. Some of the photos will show the earlier, discarded recipe, and some will show the final one that I settled on. It’s not as good as The King, but it’s damn good. -j
tahini sauce
makes about 1 cup
1 lemon
1 clove of garlic
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ cup tahini
½ cup of ice water (or more)
Salt to taste
Juice the lemon into a bowl or small container. Grate the garlic into the lemon juice and add a big pinch of salt. Allow to rest around ten minutes, or until the garlic no longer smells raw.
Add the tahini and cumin to the lemon/garlic mixture and combine it well with a whisk or immersion blender. The mixture will seize up and resemble peanut butter. That’s ok!
Add about a half cup of ice water to the mixture, and mix very well. Continue to mix and drizzle in ice water until the color of the sauce becomes pale and it reaches a pourable consistency.
Taste for seasoning and add more salt or cumin if necessary.
falafel
serves at least 3 or 4, with accoutrements
8 ounces of dried chickpeas (half a bag)
1 bunch of cilantro
1 bunch of parsley
1 bunch of scallions
1 small shallot
5 cloves of garlic
1 teaspoon of cumin powder (heaping)
1 teaspoon of coriander powder (heaping)
1 teaspoon of paprika (heaping)
½ teaspoon of turmeric powder
½ teaspoon of ground black pepper
1 teaspoon of kosher salt (heaping)
Vegetable oil for frying
Rinse the dried chickpeas well in a strainer or colander and place them in a deep bowl. You have two options for this step: a hot soak or a cold soak. If doing a hot soak, pour enough boiling water over the chickpeas to cover them by a few inches, and set them aside for 3 hours. If doing a cold soak, pour room temperature water over them and set aside for 8 hours or overnight. Once the beans have about doubled in size, drain them well and discard the water.
Wash and dry the herbs and scallions. Remove the roots from the green onions and the thicker stems of the herbs, and give everything a rough chop. There’s no need to do any intricate knife work here, just break them down a bit so the blades of the food processor can make shorter work of them.
Add the soaked chickpeas to the bowl of a food processor and grind them for at least 2 minutes, scraping down the sides of the bowl to ensure that all the pieces of chickpea are being processed evenly.
Add the herbs, scallions, shallot, and garlic to the food and processor and blend until the mixture looks moist and green. Then add the salt and spices, and pulse until well mixed. You’ll know everything is incorporated when the turmeric has given everything a slightly yellow hue. Place the mixture into a bowl and cover for plastic wrap for about 20 minutes.
Add at least an inch of vegetable oil to a sturdy pot and place over a medium high flame. If you have a thermometer (I use a cheap IR gun from eBay), you’ll want the oil to be right around 350°F. If you don’t have one, the best way to know the oil is the right temperature is if a piece of falafel immediately starts bubbling and floating when it hits the oil. We don’t want them sitting on the bottom soaking up oil and sticking to the pot.
When the oil is hot, grab two metal spoons and dip them briefly in the oil. Holding one spoon in each hand, scoop up some of the mixture with one of them. Gently pass the mixture between the two spoons until you’ve made a football-shaped falafel, and gently drop it in the oil. Fry the falafels for about 2 minutes, or just until the edges are starting to turn brown. Set them on a wire rack to drain, and repeat with the rest of the mixture.
Once all of the falafels have been fried once, place them back in the hot oil, a few at a time, until they are crispy and browned all over (probably about another minute). Serve with salad, rice, pita, baba ganoush, a cold beer, and a maddening late-inning White Sox collapse.
