Felafel, Zucchini and Tomato Turnovers, and Algonquin

     I went back and forth a few times on whether or not I was actually going to make my own pitas for the felafel recipe.  I have never made them before, and it seemed like it might be too much for me to attempt on a weekday.  However, by Wednesday, I still hadn't purchased any commercially made pitas to substitute, so I decided I had better at least give it a try. 

PITA BREAD

2 cups unbleached all-purpose white flour

1 pkg. dry yeast

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. sugar

3/4 cup luke warm water

     Dissolve the yeast and sugar in the warm water and set aside for 5 minutes.  Sift the flour and salt into a bowl.  Make a depression in the flour and pour in the yeast mixture.  Mix well and turn out onto a floured board.  Knead the dough for 8-10 minutes.

     Dust the top of the dough with flour and place it in a clean bowl, cover with a clean dish towel and set it in a warm, draft-free place to rise for 1½ hours.  Punch the dough down and let it rise for another 45 minutes.

     After the second rising period, knead the dough for 2 minutes and form it into 8 balls of equal size.  Cover the balls and let them  rise for another half hour.  Preheat the oven for 15 minutes to 500º (or the highest setting your oven has).  After they have risen, flatten the dough balls with the palm of your hand.  They should be about 1/4" thick.  Lightly flour a baking sheet and back 1 or two of the pieces of dough at a time for 3-4 minutes on each side.

     Pita will be light brown in color when it is done.  The loaves will puff as they bake.

I threw all of the ingredients into my KitchenAide, and let it do most of the work.  Once the dough had combined into a cohesive ball, I turned it out into an oiled bowl and set it aside, while I worked on the sauce for the turnovers.

     Since I was going all out with the pita bread, I figured I could skimp a little for the sauce and go with the "Speed-Scratch" Sauce instead of the "Slow-Simmered".

SPEED-SCRATCH TOMATO SAUCE

2 tbsp olive oil

2 cloves garlic, minced

3 cups jarred pasta sauce

1 15-ounce can tomatoes with oregano and garlic

1/2 tsp red pepper flake

      In a large saucepan, combine olive oil and garlic.  Cook over medium heat, stirring for 2 minutes.  Add pasta sauce.

     Place canned tomatoes with liquid in a blender and pulse until pureed.  Add tomatoes to saucepan along with red pepper flakes.  Bring mixture to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.  Sauce should be reduced and thickened.  Cool slightly before using in recipes.

     I had some Ragu sauce that I had bought on sale for a dollar, and instead of canned tomatoes, I used a quart of tomatoes from the freezer (our own garden tomatoes).  I get what Jeff and I call "freezer points" for this.  Any time we use up stuff from the freezer instead of buying new, we get "freezer points".  I am considering giving him negative freezer points for buying more stuff to put INTO the freezer, though.

     I started out with the olive oil in my sauce pan and dumped in some garlic, and I thought I would start the dough for the turnovers while that was heating up.  At least I could get a few steps in before I had to add the Ragu.  Apparently, measuring the yeast and water took longer than I had imagined...  My garlic burned and stuck to the bottom of my pan (especially where the Teflon was worn off.

      I dumped this out and cleaned the pan and started over.  I decided to concentrate this time until its 20 minute simmer.  Once I had the sauce, tomatoes, and hot pepper flake added to the garlic, I added a little dried oregano and basil, since I wasn't using the canned tomatoes with the seasoning already in it.  After 20 minutes of simmering, though, my sauce wasn't reduced and thickened, as the recipe had promised me it would be.  I imagined it was because my frozen garden tomatoes had more liquid in them than the canned variety would  have.  I put a splatter-shield over the pot and let it bubble away while I continued with the turnover dough project.

     While I was putting the ingredients for the dough into the KitchenAide, I had a bright idea.  My KitchenAide has an attachment to grate cheese (and/or zucchini).  The same gear that drives the beater around the bowl also drives a shaft that spins a barrel attached to the head of the mixer.  The barrel is the shredder.  I was thinking that I could save time by grating the cheese and zucchini while the dough was mixing.

     My first lesson was to STOP the mixer before trying to attach the grater contraption.  It was a little jarring to try and get the square shaft of the attachment into the spinning hole.  Once I had the mixer stopped and the grater attached, I tried again.  This did not work as seamlessly as I had anticipated.  The moment the dough hook hit an especially thick portion of dough, it slowed the grater and it tipped the bowl in its stand.  The bowl frequently tips during dough-making, but I have free hands to steady the bowl.  This time I had one hand feeding the grater and another preparing the next item to into the grater.  The grater must not have been assembled to the mixer properly, because it fell out as I was trying to straighten out the bowl.  I think I had better stick to one task at a time.

     Now that my cheese and my zucchini were shredded, I wanted to work on getting as much of the felafel made as I could.  Or is it falafel?  I am not sure why this recipe spells it differently than every other recipe I have seen for it.  I Googled it, and Google changed the spelling to falafel - maybe felafel is the Israeli version and falafel is the English version?  Who knows.  Maybe this author just had a bad editor.

     First on the list of things to do was to soak the cracked wheat.  Oh yeah.  Cub didn't have that, and I was going to find it somewhere else, but in between job-hunting, resume-writing, interview-clothes-shopping, and laying around feeling sorry for myself, I never did go and find cracked wheat.  I searched through my cupboards and my refrigerator.  No cracked wheat there either, but I did find a package of barley.  Now, I know it isn't the same thing.  It probably isn't even close, but it is a grain.  So, I put it in a bowl, and covered it with water to soak as if it were cracked wheat.

     After draining and rinsing the garbanzos, I put them in my Vitamix.  I probably should have saved some of the bean liquid, because the beans were a little to dry to just whir them up on their own.  I had to really help it along with the tamper to get it to smooth out.

     I looked at several other falafel recipes on line, and I didn't see any other recipes that called for a slice of bread to be soaked and added into the mixture.  When I saw the bread listed on the ingredient list, I had assumed it was going to be crumbled and made into some kind of coating or something.  As weird as I thought it was, I went ahead and soaked the slice of bread (I used potato bread - the squishy white bread I use to make Jeff's sandwiches) and squeezed it out.  It turned into a little tiny ball of yellow goo, which I threw into the Vitamix.

      Coriander is a a spice I rarely use, so I had to go to my auxiliary spice storage unit.

      I keep all of the spices I have that don't have a proper jar or a space on the spice cupboard shelves in a large tin that used to contain two bottles of Bailey's.  My mother bought me the Bailey's on our way home from Scotland in 1989.  We got it in the duty free shop at the airport, and while she was buying the liquor for my under-aged self, she was also giving me a lecture about alcoholism and my particular susceptibility to it, because I come from a long line of alcoholics.  I promised not to become one, and she handed over the booze.
     I added the coriander, the cumin, salt, and pepper.  I re-read the recipe.  I read it yet again.  When was I supposed to put in the lemon juice I had worked so hard to squeeze?

     Since it was never specifically mentioned in the body of the recipe instructions, I decided that it must be part of the "spices and parsley", and I poured it into the Vitamix along with everything else.  I had drained my "cracked wheat" and put that in there too, but I was concerned, because it didn't seem to have softened much in the hour or so it had been soaking.  I put it in anyway, hoping that the overnight stint in the refrigerator would soften them up.

      At this point, my empty stomach was getting the better of me, and I decided that I should make us some dinner, before we both wasted away to nothing.  Okay, that won't happen any time soon, but I wanted to prevent any ensuing crabbiness that seems to rear its ugly head when food hasn't been administered in the last 6 hours.  I figured once I was done with dinner, I could bake the pitas, package up the felafel batter, package up the tomato sauce, clean up and go to bed.  Unfortunately, it didn't happen that way.  I finished dinner, sat back for a little mindless t.v. before getting back into it, and promptly fell asleep.  When I woke up and decided to drag myself to bed, I realized that my speed-scratch sauce, that was supposed to simmer for twenty minutes had been simmering this whole time - about 4 hours!  Well, it had definitely thickened.  It actually looked pretty good.  I turned it off, put the pita dough in the fridge, and went to bed.

    

      After I got up in the morning, I put the sauce in the refrigerator, and took the turnover dough and the pita dough out of the refrigerator to do a slow rise while I was at work.
      When I got home, I started on the pitas.  I cut the dough into 8 equal pieces.

I rolled them into balls.



     By the time Pam, Jennifer, Roger, and the kids arrived, I had them all flattened out into little disks.  They were pretty small, but I was afraid if I had rolled them out any bigger, they would be too thin to "puff up".  I think they may have already been that thin.

     After the pitas were in the oven for about three minutes, I flipped them over.  Pam had brought over a bottle of something she had earlier in the week with some friends, and she was the only one that liked it, so she took it home with her.  It was Palinka - an Hungarian brandy-type liqueur made with apricots.  It tasted similar to an unsweetened, flavored vodka, but it was really smooth and warmed the tummy instantly.  Needless to say, I had missed the three minute deadline for the pitas.  They were a little crisp and didn't look at all like they would have "pockets".  I told Pam I was going to send Jeff to the store to get regular pitas or we could build them like tostadas, but she assured me that she would be able to get them to work like the pockets they were supposed to be.  She would handle the cutting and filling.

     I set Jennifer up to start on the drink.  I chose this one, because Jeff had some Canadian whiskey he had brought home and then turned his nose up at it.  He decided he just really doesn't like it now that he has had access to all of the lovely bourbons there are available.

ALGONQUIN

2 measures Canadian whisky (I used Crown Royal)

1 measure dry vermouth

1 measure pineapple juice

     Shake all the ingredients well with ice and strain into a rocks glass half-filled with cracked ice.  Garnish with lemon.

     It turned out to be an interesting drink.  "Interesting" is a Minnesota term that means "I don't really like it, but I don't hate it, and I am too polite to say anything bad about it".  Even though Jennifer had shaken it up, the flavors came through in layers.  First I tasted the Canadian, sweet and warm; then the sour of the vermouth; followed by the tang of the pineapple.  On the second round, I tried it with less vermouth, but the same amount of pineapple, but there was still the separation and still the slightly sour taste.  I decided that pineapple and whisky just aren't meant to go together.

     Once she had the drinks prepared and dolled out, I had her work on the felafel.  She rolled the chickpea mixture into balls to prepare for frying.  She was reading the directions, and exclaimed, "these are supposed to be set aside for 1½ hours to dry!"  I explained that the mixture had been sitting out for twenty-four hours, so I felt it was dry enough for our purposes.

     While she did that, I started working on the filling for the turnovers.  I chopped the tomatoes, shredded the basil and mixed the ricotta and zucchini together, after giving the zucchini a little squeeze to rid it of extra water.  I added the basil and the tomatoes.  By this time, Pam had the dough divided into three portions and rolled out for my three calzones.

     I quickly divided the cheese and zucchini mixture between the three dough circles, sprinkled them all with the Asiago, and closed them up.    

     They were pretty.  I was just getting ready to put them in the oven, when I noticed the pan of tomato sauce on the counter.  Oh no!  That was supposed to go inside the turnovers!  I looked at my perfectly sealed calzones,m and my shoulders slumped.  I reached out to start to open them back up, when Jennifer suggested that we serve the sauce on the side as a dip.  Genius!  I put them in the oven and checked on Jennifer's progress with the felafel balls.

     She was doing great.  they were perfectly round, beautifully golden, and looked to be crispy.  They actually looked like giant toasted chickpeas.  We, of course, had to sample one to make sure that tasted okay.
     Pam was also doing great with the pita breads.  She was able to cut them all in half and open them up for filling.  I think one pita may have bitten the dust or crumbled to dust or something along that line, but for the most part, they all seemed to work out alright.

     They were a little small, and we could fit no more than two felafels in each pocket.  We thought that they were funny-looking assembled like that, and we started calling them ball-sacks. Unfortunately, that turned Jeff and Roger off of them (not that they were all that excited to try them to begin with), and they refused to try them.  I could have taken or left the pitas themselves.  They were like water crackers.  It was a nice vessel to hold the felafels, but they really didn't add much to the game.  The felafels were awesome. The exteriors were crispy and brown, the interiors soft and delicious.  The flavor rolled around my tongue.  It was unusual - warm, earthy, with a slight liquorice flavor in the background.  There was something addictive about them.  The barley had apparently softened up, because the inside was completely smooth.
     The turnovers came out of the oven.  The crust was crisp, but it was still pale.  I think that they needed to have an egg wash applied before their stint in the oven, just for aesthetics.  I like the look of  a golden brown calzone, especially if it is a little shiny, too.

     These had good flavor.  they were hot and gooey and moist, even before dipping them in the "speed-scratch sauce".  Jennifer declared that she thought that dipping them was much better than having the sauce inside anyway.  I felt that the name of the rcipe was a little off the mark.  Sure, it had zucchini and tomato in it, but the zucchini and tomato was lost in all of that ricotta. This was probably a good thing for Jeff, since he claims to not like zucchini, but I would have liked a little of the green flavor to shine through.