Baba Ghanouj

Baba Ghanoush?

Baba Ganouj?

Eggplant dip.

Smoky, creamy eggplant dip. Thick and smooth, I don't want to knock hummus, but when I'm served hummus and baba ghanouj on the same plate, it's the eggplant dip that goes first.  And, much like hummus, baba ghanouj is really easy to make.  Even better than hummus, baba ghanouj is really easy to freeze, so you can have the goodness of eggplant season whenever you need it.

But I'm not being fair to hummus, and that's not why we're here.

Falafel Dinner - part three - hummus, roasted cauliflower and more

This is the third and final post in the series - really, this is all the other stuff we made to go with the falafel, stuffed inside a pita, the stuff that wasn't really about recipes and wasn't really photographed throughout.

Falafel Dinner - part two - whole wheat pita bread

I spend a lot of time talking about how I don't bake.   Part of it is my disinterest in most sweets (can we have french fries for dessert instead?) and the other part is the precision and the measuring.  I like to cook by smell.   And yet, I made pita bread.

This was part of this weekend's big time falafel dinner - yesterday I posted the falafel, and tomorrow I'll post the hummus, and the rest will come as it comes. 

I read through maybe 20 pita bread recipes to get here, and many said that you can't really make pita at home and that the traditional way required an oven hotter than home ovens were capable of getting.  I figured if it didn't work, I'd have some sort of flatbread that would be just fine, and if it REALLY didn't work, I had tortillas in the fridge.   Spoiler alert - it totally worked.

Falafel Dinner - part one - baked falafel

I've been struggling to figure out how to post this one.   It's a meal with a bunch of recipes, and it's too much to fit in one post, because several of the recipes would stand on their own.   So we'll do a multi-parter.

This is pretty exciting (if you're me) because we successfully made baked falafel, pita bread, hummus (not that exciting, I make it all the time) and other accessories for a full on falafel dinner.  So I think we'll do this in parts.  Today, falafel.

I never really had falafel until I went to Temple, where it was easily accessible on campus.  Then I didn't have it again until I moved to Philadelphia.   I'm a sucker for Maoz and The Pita Pit and all the other Center City falafel joints.  Sous Chef Brian's experiences with falafel were all about some time he spent in Europe in the late 90s, until I took him to Maoz a couple years ago.

I had imagined making falafel would be difficult, but it was not.