I've had falafels a few times in restaurants, but only nibbled because I had no clue what was in them and wasn't sure if they passed the good-for-you test. This week, I made my own for the first time and discovered that falafels are a unique combination of very high-quality ingredients...and deep frying.

What makes the ingredients so good? You basically begin to sprout the beans (traditionally garbanzos or favas, but we used mung beans) by soaking them for 24 hours, so they probably have many of the nutritional qualities of sprouts. To that, you add herbs and spices, then fry just barely long enough to cook the centers. (As this was my first learning experience, I actually didn't quite cook some of the centers --- smaller balls or flattening them into cakes would be called for next time around.)

I used this recipe, slightly tweaked, and found the result very tasty, although perhaps a bit higher in onion than I'd like. For our next experiment, Mark suggested replacing half of the beans with canned salmon, then frying like cakes rather than deep-frying. Good thing we've got more mung beans to experiment with!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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