Falafels, an ode to the Glorious Channa

Chickpea/Channa, wondrous Legume, oozing versatility.

We use you in glorious ways, from hummus to Falafel goodness.

Even plain, with curry and cumin, your flavorful facets are revealed,

And you're not found wanting;

You're wanted.

We've never felt this way before about small beans.

How can we explain it with mere words,

With verbs and nouns, with adjectives and alliterations?

Fried or pressured, you let us into your delectable, disguised world,

And all I daresay,

Is try then enjoy.

These are bomb.

Ingredients:

Prepared Channa (chickpeas) (either from can or soaked then pressured)

Broadleaf Thyme

4 cloves of Garlic

An Onion

Egg

Oil (a little to saute, then a fair amount to fry)

Squeeze in half a lime (optional)

Crushed crackers (we use Crix) or Breadcrumbs

Directions:

Saute the Onion and Garlic Then Mash up the Channa/chickpeas in a large bowl adding the thyme (you can even use Guyanese Celery, or parsley), garlic, onion and lime. Then add in the egg and continue mashing.

Add in the Breadcrumbs or crushed crackers to thicken the eggy, channa mixture.

Roll up (using a Tsp or Tbsp) the falafel mixture s into either balls or thick disks with your hands.

While you're mashing and rolling, heat up oil in the Kaharee (or some other frying mechanism) in preparation of deep frying your falafels.

When the oil is hot, drop your balls/ovals it. Let them fry on all sides for about 3-4 minutes or until they're brown and hard.

Enjoy!!

*We've used these falafels in two ways. The first time we made some Roti, and wrapped the falafels in them with some cucumber, lettuce, tomato, and cream cheese (since we didn't have cucumber yogurt sauce). The next time, we just made a fresh salad (lettuce, tomato, cucumber, carrot, little cheese) and crumbled the falafels on top of the greens, and made a homemade vinaigrette (olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and some spices) This was really, really good. (if only we had some feta cheese....)

-TT

Hot Pepper Experiments

So as we've mentioned before there is a sauce/garnish here called “Pepper”. It's a mix of hot, savory, vinegary preserved goodness. It's similar to salsa, but waaaaaaay more spicy. I've been promising myself that I'd make it at some point, but just never got around to it. However, the other day we just returned from Town and the pepper bush in our kitchen garden had exploded with peppers. We saw a few green “fruits” before we left, but as we walked closer to our residence we noticed the green peppers had turned a hot shade of crimson. Funny story about this plant. When a neighbor first gave us the plantling we thought it would grow into sweet peppers, but Chelsea's burning eyes, and red rimmed nose (she had touched her face after she cut it) bear witness to our misconception. It was actually a hot pepper plant rather than a sweet. Ooops. So we had some peppers just dying to be picked, and we couldn't for the life of us use all of them just in our every day cooking, so I decided to stop the procrastination and make some pepper sauce.

Hot peppers, deseeded, (about half a pound, we used about 8-9 of them)

2 cups of Vinegar (We used Apple Cider Vinegar, it has a very distinct taste, not sure if I'd recoommend it)

Cucumber

2 Onions

4-5 cloves of Garlic

tsp of Oil

*I added some water to cut the vinegar...use your own discretion)

We cut up and blended all of the ingredients together to make a fine, fine blended liquid (like salsa)

Then we simmered the blended ingredients for 10 minutes and put the liquid in jars and let it cool

Voila! Pepper sauce. I am sure there are other recipes out there, this was just an initial one we tried.