Falafel (the start of a banner cooking weekend)

No idea what got into me yesterday, but I started cooking, and cooking and cooking. I prepared starter doughs for two breads (pizza dough and cinnamon walnut swirl bread - both whole wheat), made cookie dough, made tomato sauce, and put some dried chick peas in water to soak.

Every time I go to the library, which seems to be quite often lately, I check out the cookbooks for something new and different or something I hadn't seen before. A few days ago I tried The Flexitarian Table: Inspired, Flexible Meals for Vegetarians, Meat Lovers, and Everyone in Between. Not too many recipes interesting to me, but a few caught my eye.

Now that I have a real Cuisinart 7-Cup Food Processor, I could make proper falafel. I liked the flexitarian recipe because it used dried chickpeas and had a lot of good seasonings. I followed the recipe in the book pretty closely except that I used less onion and more garlic. I was a little concerned when i started taking the dough out of the food processor b/c there was no flour or egg or anything, so I wasn't sure how it was going to stick together.... but it did!!! I shallow fried it in grapeseed oil, and it got this nice really crispy crust on it. I was worried I overcooked it....

But then I bit into it, and as you can see, it was just right! Nice and moist and soft inside, REALLY crispy/crunchy outside (I thank the grapeseed oil for that, love frying with it). And all around really good! I froze the rest for 2 future easy quick dinners, hopefully it cooks up after being frozen just as nicely.

Yum! I will be posting photos from the other things I made this weekend soon.