Crushing Krisis

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Crushing On: Crispy Baked Falafel (in the style of Philly’s Mama’s Vegetarian)

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There were seemingly endless choices for lunch when I worked in Center City Philadelphia, but my long-standing favorite of nearly two decades was heading to the now-shuttered Mama’s Vegetarian for a falafel platter.

I’ve had many, many falafel balls from dozens of other places since then, but nothing has ever been quite the same for me. To me, Mama’s was how all falafels were meant to taste.

As I have grown in my culinary powers over the course of the pandemic, I have conquered several dishes previously far out of my grasp to prepare.

That lead me to ask: Could I create a falafel just as good at home?

At first, it seemed like the major challenge would not be perfecting flavor, but the actual cooking.

You see, I have a confession to make: I hate frying. It’s not a health concern so much as I don’t even like most fried foods (at my advanced age). As a result, I have developed neither the technique nor the patience for the mess of popping and splattering that comes with frying.

I forgot to take any photos of my lovely trays of falafels straight out of the oven because this is not a damn recipe blog, but I did design this alluring sample plate for you while making lunch for the kid today.

Luckily, here in New Zealand nearly every oven comes equipped with a “fan bake” mode, which effectively makes them just-slightly-larger air fryers. (Ovens here are tiny compared to US ovens.) If you brush something with some oil it usually crisps up quite nicely, so I have been fearless in converting fried things to fan-baked things.

Except… falafel is different, as I learned in my first attempt. Their uncooked texture could be described as “several hundred grains of sand who claim to have never met before.” To me, they seemed highly reliant on hitting some hot oil to give them a crispy exterior shell to hold them together.

That meant I not only had to screen recipes for flavor, but also adjust them for baking consistency. I tried a recipe from my typical healthy go-to Cookie & Kate, but it was too bland (rare for her!). Downshiftology’s recipe got me closer, but they were coming out too crunchy. The Guardian’s version tasted right, but the consistency wasn’t solid enough for baking.

After several rounds of test-kitchen-ing from their trio of recipes, I’ve landed on crispy baked falafel that – to me – tastes just like Mama’s without any of the fuss of frying.

Does that make my baked falafel authentic? Er… look, my approach to non-Italian cooking is the same to my approach to Italian cooking, which is: you can’t really make it offensive unless it tastes bad or you use the wrong kind of cheese.

More specifically: First, we don’t like cilantro in this house, so that’s a big departure from nearly every recipe. Second, falafel recipes all subtly disagree on the spices to include, with some recommending lemon zest while others use dill and cayenne pepper and some insist on cardamom. Finally, some of my adjustments I made were for baking stability versus frying.

All I can promise is that they authentically taste like my memory of Mama’s. [Read more…] about Crushing On: Crispy Baked Falafel (in the style of Philly’s Mama’s Vegetarian)

My Best Pesto

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I don’t remember the first time I had pesto, but it is one of my favorite things to add to any food.

pesto-in-jar-crushingkrisisPasta. Salmon. Shrimp. Toast. Eggs. Chips dipped directly into it. Pesto makes everything better. It’s also pretty much an entire spinach salad in every few spoons, which is how I help justify how quickly I can consume it compared to the amount of cheese and oil it contains.

I clearly recall having it at the appropriately-named Ristorante Pesto on Broad Street as a teenager, but that seems like such a late point in life to have tasted pesto for the first time.

Thus, while I wish I could say this is an old family recipe, it’s not – it’s just adapted from The Better Homes and Gardens cookbook over the course of dozens of trials over the course of the past decade. It used to be that E made it and then I just greedily consumed it. Finally, I became impatient about waiting for her to decide she felt like making pesto and so I made it myself and realized it is so easy to do (as long as you have a decent food processor).

Now I make double and triple batches every time so I can enjoy as much pesto as I want on my pasta and everything else.

Here is the ingredient list for an 8oz batch of pesto, which is probably enough to toss with for pasta for four. I use the alterations in parenthesis every time, but they make things more complex – you’ll do just fine ignoring them your first time. [Read more…] about My Best Pesto

the perfect potato process

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I often bemoan that I don’t especially enjoy baking things because I can’t tweak a recipe to taste as I go like I can while cooking on the stovetop, but the real problem is a matter of kitchen chemistry.

Case and point: roasted potatoes. They’re delicious, they’re easy, and we love to eat them, but I hardly ever made them before the past few months. Getting the taste just right isn’t the problem. It’s all down to one factor: crispiness. No matter how tiny I diced my potatoes or how high temperature I roasted them, I’d still get the same soggy, saggy wedges.

Perfectly Crispy PotatoesI cracked the code back in November with the help of some tips from RachelCooks.com. I wasn’t getting anything wrong about the temperature or size of my potatoes. It turns out that the magic of crispiness is a matter of chemistry, and it all comes down to the prep work. You’ve got to soak some of the starch out of your spuds, plus dry them thoroughly and space them out on the pan.

With Rachel’s tips on my side, my roasted potatoes when from flaccid to super-crispy in three attempts!

However, now I have my own tip to add to the mix. If you want delicious, savory roasted potatoes, mincing an onion isn’t going to get you there. What you need are shallots.

Shallots have a much subtler spiciness than onion, and a sweet undertone that comes out when they’re roasted. I’d go with one to two of them to match Rachel’s recipe in lieu of the onion. I used to dice them by hand, but lately I just drop them into the food processor along with a quarter cup of grated romano cheese and a tablespoon of minced garlic from a jar. I add that mix to the potatoes along with salt, pepper, and olive oil, but otherwise follow Rachel’s instructions to the tee.

The result? Perfect, restaurant-quality, super-crispy potatoes, every time.

(Sadly, we ate them all before I could snap a photo to go with this post!)

little hits (of dopamine)

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I’m an addict.

I don’t drink or do drugs. I don’t smoke or touch caffeine. My addiction is satisfaction and I will mainline anything that can produce it. That chemical feeling of being satisfied. Those little hits of dopamine in my brain.

This week it’s been games. Boring, pointless, meaningless internet games literally in a category called “idle” to indicate that they’re purely engineered for running in the background and wasting your time.

(Think Sim City when you used to leave it running overnight to gather mucho dollars and hopefully avoid an earthquake, only instead of sleeping you are watching raptly as the numbers tick ever higher.)

The urge came on Saturday night. Weekends after bedtime are usually my big opportunity to knock out huge chunks of writing on CK – and, especially for finishing new comic guides! This past Saturday I couldn’t get in the mood. Words were coming in fits and starts. Nothing satisfying.

And so, for reasons I can’t entirely explain, I loaded up Kongregate for the first time in years and started poking around for simple games to play. My drug of choice is usually tower defense, but I stumbled into idlers and my night was gone.

The games were at once awful and great for satisfaction. The numbers tick up constantly! You get to click things! If there is enough ticking and clicking, sometimes new things light up! It’s the adult equivalent of an infant playmat that lights up and makes sounds. The best of the bunch was surely Swarm Simulator, a plain text game all about exponential growth and ratios, with dozens of different numbers ticking up constantly. At least it’s math, I told myself.

Even as I was playing the games I hated myself for it. I’ve had them running all week and I keep hating it. I know they’re a crutch for getting my satisfaction elsewhere by doing things like working out or hitting the “Publish” button.

I just needed those little hits. [Read more…] about little hits (of dopamine)

hand me downs (or: an anthropological study of family recipes)

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Of my memories of my two grandmothers, both now long since passed, many are of their food.

They were both Italian and both only a few generations removed from southern Italy, but they cooked two distinct sets of recipes. Even their meatballs and gravy were entirely different from each other. My paternal grandmother made the best minestra maritata – or, “Italian Wedding Soup” – I’ve had in my life, to this day. My maternal grandmother made potato gnocchi from scratch – springy, substantial gnocchi the likes of which I’ve never since tasted again.

Some members of my father’s family can duplicate the Italian Wedding Soup, but my mother and I cannot recreate those gnocchis. We’ve both tried. Despite making them many times with my grandmother, I couldn’t possibly tell you the recipe.

There wasn’t one. She eyeballed the ingredients every time, combining them by hand right on her kitchen counter, cracking the eggs into a mound of flour. She could never settle on the most efficient process to cut and “thumb” them – that is, put the little divot in the middle. She alternated between a butter spreader, a pizza cutter, and her bare hands, never satisfied with any of the methods.

(Once I attempted to make them myself from memory right on our kitchen counter, not realizing that our countertops were not actual granite and would not withstand hundreds of passes with the pizza cutter, my tool of choice.)

(Oops!)

There is one recipe of my maternal grandmother’s I can make. “Scapels,” she called them, a sort of plain, egg crepe rolled up like cigars with sharp grated cheese inside and served under scalding hot soup. I only know how to make them because she could not eyeball the ratios of ingredients in the batter. My grandmother grew up during the Great Depression and barely had a grade school education. She wasn’t confident writing more than a few words in longhand and couldn’t easily multiply entire lists of ingredients.

I became her walking recipe card and recipe multiplier. The phone would ring. “PeEEter,” she would say in her Philadelphia accent, “it’s gram-mom.”  “I’m makin’ scapels. Eh, what is the recipe again? Three ta three ta one?”

“Three to one to one,” I would reply, exasperated, probably interrupted from reading a book.

“Right, right,” she would reply, as if she was just testing me and had known all along. “But, I wanna make a triple recipe. How many is that?”

“Times three, gram-mom. Nine eggs to three to three.”

“Awright, thanks. Love you.”

The recipe for her scapels is dead simple – 3 parts eggs to 1 part each flour and water, plus some salt, pepper, and parsley, and rolled up with Pecorino Romano cheese.

The hard part is cooking them to the right consistency. [Read more…] about hand me downs (or: an anthropological study of family recipes)