Recipes My Daughter Likes: Falafel

Last weekend, Birmingham's George's Melkite Greek-Catholic Church held its annual Middle Eastern Food Festival. It was a wonderful event, as always, with lots of delicious food, music and  dancing. It was a chance to sample kibbee, falafel, spinach pies, and all sorts of foods including many delectable pastries. It was also a time to learn something about another culture, including informative tours of the church. The event reminded me that it has been a while since I made falafel at home. This is one of my prized recipes that I first shared here back in 2013.

One of my favorite restaurants in Birmingham is The Pita Stop which features Middle Eastern food. It has been in town for many years and was originally started by a Lebanese family. It was there that I first became acquainted with falafel, which immediately became my favorite thing on their menu.  If you are ever in town, The Pita Stop is well worth the visit.

Years ago I was talking with a colleague about how much I liked the Middle Eastern dish. His wife was Egyptian, and he mentioned that she had a recipe and often made her own falafel. I asked if she would mind sharing the recipe, which thankfully she did.  I immediately tried it at home and it is now one of my daughter’s favorites. While she was home visiting this summer, she requested that I make it again.

Here is the recipe that I have kept in the form of a handwritten note and used for years: 

Ensaf's Falafel

Ingredients:

• 4 cups dried chick peas
• 2 large onions
• 1 whole garlic
• 2 bunches parsley
• Hot peppers (I use 4 jalapenos in my half recipe version - 5 if you like it really spicy!)
• 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• ¼ tsp baking soda
• ¼ tsp salt
• ¼ tsp ground pepper

Preparation:

Soak the chick peas overnight, drain.

Combine chick peas, onion, garlic, parsley and hot pepper. Grind twice in an electric meat grinder.

Add salt, pepper, cumin, and baking powder. Mix thoroughly.

When ready to fry the falafel, add baking soda.

Shape into patties 1 ½  inches in diameter and ½ inch thick.

Fry in deep hot oil until light brown and crisp. (I use peanut oil in a large frying pan)

Serve hot with tomato slices in Arabic (pita) bread in the form of a sandwich with tahini sauce and sliced onion. Garnish with parsley.

The falafel batter may be frozen. Thaw and add baking soda just before frying.

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I should note that when I make this, I just make a half recipe, which is as much as I want to deal with at a time. I use a food processor to do the grinding. First, I'll grind the chick peas (I do it in small batches in the food processor) then with the second grinding, I'll add the parsley, onion, and peppers I end up with a large mixing bowl full of batter with just a half recipe.  I usually have it with brown rice, sometimes with pita bread. Also, I must confess that I have never used tahini sauce when serving these at home, but I found a recipe online that looks good. You can find it here.

Falafel (photo from Wikipedia)

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Who Me? Racist?

On the day of President Obama’s first inauguration, I was thrilled to see how far our nation had come. Almost immediately afterwards, I was dismayed by the deluge of verbal attacks on the president which amounted to thinly-veiled racist attitudes.  If you have read my assessment of the Tea Party Republicans you know that I see racism to be a factor in that drive to “take our country back.”

The truth is, demographics have changed. Those who have lived their lives accustomed to being part of the privileged class by virtue of being Caucasian are understandably unsettled. All the online “petitions” to secede from the union are only the latest signs of unease regarding race, culture, and the country’s changing demographics.  When I have pointed out the element of inherent racism in the system to some of my friends on the far right, the response has usually been one of quick denial. Someone recently asked if I placed myself among the racists in the privileged class.  After giving it some thought this was my response:   

Speaking as a white man and having grown up in the segregated South, I have to say that what was ingrained in us culturally is very difficult to shake. We learned not to use the “N” word and thought that meant we were no longer racist. In truth, there are a thousand other ways we show disrespect without always realizing it.

As a Christian, I am challenged to examine those cultural things that I take for granted but which may be painful or disrespectful to someone else. This is especially true during the political season, and at a time when candidates freely toss around terms to appeal to faithful Christians. We should take care not to let the political machine drag us down to the level of those whose main motivation is money and power.

So yes, I would say that because I was born white, I have to try harder to understand the plight of the black, the Hispanic, and the immigrant in our society. I must examine the attitudes I have, the jokes I find funny, and the phrases I use that may try to put one person down just to make me feel more secure.

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"Somebody was wrong, and it wasn’t Jesus"

Wayne Flynt
Samford University Photo

I went back to my alma mater last Saturday to hear Wayne Flynt give a talk at the Samford University Library as part of the Homecoming events. He talked about what life was like when he graduated with the class of 1961. He then read an excerpt from his new memoir, Keeping the Faith: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives. The reading he chose related his experience of being challenged and seeing broader possibilities as he went from a provincial homogenous community to experience higher education and as he met people on his college campus from other parts of the world and other walks of life. I was especially taken by one quote in particular:

“It was not my parents, peers, school, or church that began to unshackle me from the chains of racism. It was the Bible. I was only a teenager in high school when the first tensions appeared between the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of John Patterson and George Wallace. Somebody was wrong. And it wasn’t Jesus.”

The reason I like that quote is that it resonates very much with my own experience. When I went to Samford University in the mid 1970s, I decided on a double major in English and Religion. One of my friends said at the time, “Not only will you have religion, you will be able to talk about it.” There may have been some truth to that. There has also been a lot of truth in Garrison Keillor’s remarks about English majors on his radio program, A Prairie Home Companion – which is why I ended up making a living as a registered nurse so I could continue to enjoy the fields of English and Religion.

My experience in the two departments became very enlightening and even liberating. The professors in the Religion Department were not the fundamentalist strand of the Baptist faith. "They all," as Wayne Flynt recalls, “held to the neo-orthodox theology as espoused by Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr; they were all theistic evolutionists; none believed in the plenary inspiration of scripture [i.e. inerrant and infallible texts directly dictated by God]. Those Baptists in 1958 were more liberal than half the country is today.” I indeed found that my professors were all caring people who wanted each student to really evaluate the concepts of life and faith in order to understand how it all works in the real world.  So many of us young Baptists had come to college having been steeped in folk religion, and this was our first opportunity to explore the faith more fully.

One particular professor, Karen Joines, was constantly being vilified by certain conservative students as a liberal bent on destroying faith. I found Karen Joines to be quite poetic as well as thought provoking. It occurred to me, since I was studying in both departments, that if Dr. Joines said the same things in the English Department that he was saying in the Religion Department, he would be hailed as a defender of the faith!  My love of literature helped me to see my studies in theology from a different perspective, and I suppose allowed me to be more open to new ideas than some of my conservative colleagues.

For me, it took most of my college career to really get to the point of being able to think through the concepts I was being exposed to (which is why I also believe in life-long learning – so many of us aren’t really at the stage to gain the most from our education while we are in our late teens and early twenties). By the time I finished college, I decided to go on to seminary. It was while I was at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, California, that I saw a need to truly change my way of thinking.  Like Wayne Flynt during his high school and college days, I was reading the Bible, which I was conditioned to believe as the truth, and seeing a radical contradiction between the words of Jesus and the Old Testament prophets vs. the ethic of my Southern Christian culture.

The ironic thing was that Golden Gate Seminary, even though it was located in California, was more conservative than Samford University back in Alabama. The more I read, however, and the more I saw of society, the more I leaned toward a more liberal take on things. It is certainly possible to be just as fanatical and polemic as a liberal as are certain conservative fundamentalists. The important thing, rather, is to be open to learning. Openness to learning, openness to hearing another point of view, may lead to a conclusion seen as conservative by some. It may lead to a more liberal view. It is possible to be liberal in some things while being conservative in others.  Authenticity is the key.

My personal motto has become, “Honor Wisdom wherever you find it, welcome Beauty whenever it arrives, follow Truth wherever it leads.” I can thank caring instructors who had unswerving integrity for setting me on that path. I can also thank Wayne Flynt for reminding me of my great blessing in his talk last Saturday.

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