Falafel

I went to Kroger yesterday to get chickpeas and excitingly enough, the organic canned chickpeas were on sale!  What better omen then an organic chickpea sale for making homemade falafel for the first time?  Atleast that's what I though.  Well... it didn't turn out so great after all.  Here's the story...

It wasn't horrible, but definitely not the best thing I've ever made.  In fact, like alot of my other cooking experiments, it was pretty mediocre.  I got the recipe off of Budget Bytes but didn't have many of spices and other ingredients that it called for. And I'm not sure what I was thinking - maybe I was overestimating my cooking abilities, or maybe I just really really wanted to make falafel - but I decided to go for it anyway.  Anyway, I was getting really excited about improvising, and was throwing random things in to replace for parsley, cayenne, cilantro, etc.  I put in a LOT of mint and cumin to make up for the flavor loss.  But who was I kidding?  NOTHING makes up for cilantro.  I mean, how could I forget that cilantro's that magic ingredient that makes everything 100,000 times better?  After all, I'm cilantro's biggest advocate.  Also, I had read recently about a mushroom falafel, so I decided to add mushroom to my mixture.  And alot of it.  I think this was my main downfall, because the final product tasted super mushroomy which was a little strange for falafel.

I pan-fried it with olive oil, but in retrospect, throwing them in a frying pot would probably have been better.  I'm thinking that this way it would have cooked the insides more consistently, and tasted better than the goopy inside falafel that I ended up with.  Overall though, considering that it was my first try, and the fact that I was super 適当 with everything, I think that it turned out pretty decent.  And with pita bread from my favorite middle eastern bakery and some feta cheese, it made a not-so-bad half-assed meal.

I'm going to have to work on this falafel a little more over the summer, and hopefully perfect the skill.