As part of the “new year, new me” attitude that is still thriving, David and I have arranged to make a couple of meals together each week so we can explore some more interesting, healthy foods together, as well as cutting back costs! Cooking for only yourself often means you can’t be bothered to make a full blown mess just for one tiny meal. Making it for two makes the process a whole lot more rewarding! We are also going to try out a ton of vegetarian meals too, as it’s healthier and more environmentally friendly! David is currently boycotting beef as it’s carbon footprint is incredibly bad, in addition to the unfair food distribution globally. People in the west eat beef, which requires a lot of energy to make, that could be used to produce more food for even more people and help such a large proportion of the world which are starving! I think I’ll join him and see how it goes! Over Christmas I made myself an account on the BBC’s Good Food home page, and gathered a set of meals for us to try out! Today we tried Falafel Burgers (original recipe)!
Ingredients:
- 400g can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
- garlic clove, chopped
- handful of flat-leaf parsley or curly parsley
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp ground coriander
- 1⁄2 tsp harissa paste or chilli powder
- 2 tbsp plain flour
- 2 tbsp sunflower oil
- toasted pitta bread
- 200g tub tomato salsa, to serve
- green salad with pepper and tomato to serve
- Mayonnaise
- 1 small red onion, roughly chopped
Making this dish was incredibly easy! Just wash and dry the chickpeas and add them to a food processor (we used a smoothie blender, student life) together with the rest of the ingredients: onion, garlic, parsley, spices, flour and salt! The recipe didn’t say anything about adding water, but we found it to be a little easier to blend with a bit of added water. The water made the blended paste a little firmer and stuck together too, which made it easier to shape it into four patties with our hands. We then heated a pan with oil and fried the patties for 3 minutes on each side untill they were golden brown.
In addition to this we chopped up some lettuce, tomato and pepper for salad, and served with salsa and mayonnaise as well! A quick couple of minutes to toast the pitabreads, and voilá! Meal for two! They were incredibly delicious and filling, and we are definitely making these yummy things again!
