In which there’s hours of cooking.

First you have to soak the chickpeas and make the bread, so best be starting the day before. Because we’ve got executive function, oh yes we do, so it only took, what, three weeks of thinking about it before we did it.

Anyway, I made some super high hydration dough and prepared it as if it were ciabatta, but it basically just came out like all my bread does. Which is fine, it’s still good. (I thought about making actual pita bread but by the time I did I no longer cared enough to get the flour back out.)

homemade bread

So the problem is that, aside from a food truck I once heard about five years ago and which may or may not still exist, there’s no falafel around here. None. Zero. So I have to make my own.

falafel balls!

Well, I mean, there’s a Greek place in Walla Walla, but they make a style I really don’t like, called revithokeftedes, which is basically falafel only with terrible texture.

I don’t have a food processor—well, I have a little tiny one, but I only use it for olive salad—so I have to make my falafel in the blender, which is a pain in the ass, but I pretty much have it dialed in now.

I used the old oil that’s been sitting in my fryer for God knows how long; it’s probably a little rancid but not bad enough to stink or anything. Just made the falafels taste more professional, honestly.

Here’s some tabbouleh, my favorite salad of all time:

tabbouleh

I don’t like the fine bulgur so I always use the more rustic stuff. It feels unbelievably wholesome, somehow.

The hummus is from a can and it’s fucking wonderful.

ziyad hot spicy hummus

It took me years, but I finally figured out that the best way to make tahini sauce is to use hot water. It really comes together much more easily that way, with, I think, possibly better texture somehow.

Anyway, after baking bread and getting the blender dirty and chopping all that parsley and opening a can and making tahini and deep frying all those little balls, after all that, the food was fucking wonderful!

YUM

Tahini always reminds me now of eating in a falafel place in Brooklyn (which apparently still exists); there were squeeze bottles of tahini on every table (the same style as those old mustard and ketchup ones, only bigger, and white rather than yellow or red) and how much I loved just having that much fucking tahini to pour all over my falafel and rice.

In unrelated news, I bought a necklace and emailed with my aunt. Pretty sure it’s been over a dozen days since I last showered. Later this month two other aunts will be in town visiting, and the whole family will be going out to Sunday dinner. Also I learned how to remove and replace the back wheel on my bike the month before last, which was actually pretty cool and of course much easier than I’d expected.