Falafel

A meal everyone in the family enjoys! These are hard to come by these days, so I thought I'd better record it here for my own reference before the paper version gets lost.

Falafel

• 1 ¾ cups dried chickpeas
• 1 small onion, roughly chopped
• ½ cup fresh cilantro or about 1/8 cup dried cilantro
• 2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
• 1 Tbsp ground cumin
• ½ tsp baking soda
• 1 ½ tsp salt
• 2 Tbsp gram flour
• canola oil for frying

1. Put the chickpeas in a large saucepan and cover with lots of water. Bring to a boil and boil for 2 minutes, then leave to soak for 1–2 hours. (Alternatively, just soak them overnight.) Drain.
2. Put the drained chickpeas into a food processor with the onion, cilantro, garlic, cumin, baking soda, and salt and whiz until the ingredients are finely ground and hold together.
3. Take a small handful of the mixture and squeeze it between your palms to extract any excess liquid. Shape into a thick patty. Repeat until you've used up all the mixture, then coat the falafels lightly in gram flour.
4. Shallow-fry the falafel in hot canola oil until brown and crisp on all sides. Drain on paper towel.

Notes
- I'm not a fan of a lot of cilantro, so this is about half of what the original recipe recommends. It was a nice flavour for us.
- I haven't yet mastered the art of keeping falafel patties together during frying, so I just ended up frying it as a loose mixture. This worked out fine for serving it in pita with tzatziki, lettuce and tomato, almost like a taco.