The Falafel Fail

Being volunteered for random tasks is an occupational hazard of parenthood. The ability to say "no" is a critically important skill to possess, particularly when you've been granted the luxury of deciding whether or not to accept the gift of having been involuntarily volunteered. Unfortunately, it is not a word of which My Lovely Wife and I avail ourselves frequently enough.

We have served on numerous church committees, band committees, school booster and PTA committees. We have volunteered in school classrooms, Sunday school classrooms, chaperoned field trips, overseen finances, orchestrated parental support, planned and implemented fundraisers, and provided more meals than we care to recall. In almost all these situations, we had the chance to say "no." However, faced with the knowledge no other parents were stepping forward, we stepped up to take part or take charge.

The positive take aways from these experiences are immeasurable. The most significant is a rewarding sense of fulfillment knowing we helped enhance the lives of our children, and hundreds of other children, throughout the last two decades. The only negative is having seen the wizards behind the curtains at many different institutions and events that have lost their magical luster as a result. People are flawed, I get that, but sometimes flawed people are so content to remain flawed that they've no interest in receiving constructive criticism and no ability to learn from it when it's offered. It can be disheartening, causing you to back away from volunteering to regain your naive faith in humanity. It's at times like these -- when you start thinking you're doing too much in too many places and alienating too many people by offering your opinion too often -- your children volunteer you for a simple task you simply can't refuse. 

It's been years since I've been able to help with math or science homework. I've forgotten all formal education back to kindergarten, it seems, so when the twins told us they volunteered to bring homemade falafel to school as part of a Human Geography project, I was excited. Cooking might not be my calling, but I love it, and I had never before made falafel. Here was a challenge I could face with a smile, my boys by my side, as we mastered making this Middle Eastern meal. 

Perhaps mastered isn't the correct word...

We started off on the wrong foot by using canned chick peas instead of dried chick peas and soaking them for twenty-four hours like the recipe instructed. When you have only 48 hours notice, you can't sit around waiting for a garbanzo bean to rehydrate. You take the ones packed in water and chuck them in the food processor.

Next we added the brief list of spices that, despite the brevity of the list, infused such a toxic pungency of Mediterranean aromatics that tasting the raw batter was an exercise in self abuse. It's nearly impossible to determine the proper quantities of cumin and cayenne when your tastebuds have been carpet-bombed into oblivion.

The canola oil I found to deep fry our fiendishly fiercesome falafel batter wasn't much help. The only canola oil in the house had been used once already for frying donuts. Our falafel would set your mouth ablaze and scorch your throat like a barbed jet-fueled ghost pepper, but at least you'll enjoy the subtle hint of cinnamon apple while rolling on the ground scraping your tongue with a cheese grater. 

Fortunately, we never found out. Possibly because our batter was too wet from having used mushy canned chick peas, or possibly because the donut oil wasn't quite hot enough -- or most likely because we're from the Mid-Atlantic and not the Middle East -- our batter entered the oil in tablespoon-size dollops and rapidly dissolved amidst greasy cinnamon apple splatters into thousands of quickly burned falafel particles. We tried a few to similar effect, only to discard the remaining batter and reach the conclusion that hummus and pita chips are a reasonable substitute for a school project, especially since someone else would be making the hummus. 

2017 Mark Feggeler

Merry Eating Day!

The holidays are here, which means it's time to bloat the twenty extra pounds I normally carry around with me to a seasonally appropriate thirty. It also means massive quantities of food must be prepared in order to provide at least five pounds per plateload, regardless of whether we're talking about a salad plate, a dinner plate, or a dessert plate.

Yesterday (Christmas Eve-Eve) was primary cooking day for our Christmas day celebrations. In two days, we will feed a total of eight people -- the five who live under our roof, plus my parents and Brother Tom. Naturally, then, we browned three pounds of sausage, rolled eight pounds of beef and pork into meatballs and browned them, then tossed all of that browned meaty goodness into a vat of homemade sauce.

Next came cookies. Simplicity was the motto of the day, so we kept it to one kind of cookie -- the ubiquitous peanut butter Kiss cookie -- that could be easily thrown together and baked without distracting too much from the browning of the meatballs and sausage. Fresh from their morning meat-rolling calisthenics, the kids helped roll out four trays of peanut buttery deliciousness, in addition to shucking several dozen Hershey's Kisses.

After a brief break to clean a pan, or seven, it was time to experiment with something new -- cinnamon pumpkin roll with chocolate mascarpone ganache.

I've baked many things, but never a finished cake that had to be rolled. It seemed like an awful lot of work to go through just to create a delivery method for getting pumpkin cake and chocolate ganache to my mouth, but I was game. Besides, Giada de Laurentis and the Food Network wouldn't steer me wrong.

To Giada's credit, both the cake and the ganache are amazingly delectable, however rolling the pumpkin spice cake might not have been my finest culinary hour. I passed the first test, flipping the pan and dropping the cake onto a towel dusted with powdered sugar. Trouble is, my definition of dusting is slightly more aggressive than Giada's. The cake landed with a satisfying plop and shot powdered sugar up and out like a Christmas-tinged mushroom cloud full of elf fairies and pumpkiny aromas. The next bit, actually rolling the cake without breaking, mangling, tearing, shearing, or otherwise causing traumatic damage to said cake, was less messy but much more sketchy. In the end, I manhandled it into something that roughly resembles a rolled cake.

Today continued with more baking. After all, you can't serve seventeen pounds of meat and sauce without homemade Italian bread, and where one loaf might suffice, two certainly will provide that measure of overkill necessary for a proper holiday feast.

Oh, did I mention the cannoli? Yeah, I bought twenty pre-made cannoli shells (half of them covered in chocolate, because they were there) and prepped two pounds of filling so we can stuff them on Christmas day short before we sit down to eat our six-and-a-half pounds of meat, sauce, pasta and bread each. That way, the cannoli can set up in the fridge without getting the shells all soggy. You have to plan ahead for these things, you know.

The end result is that, by the time we tuck the kids into bed tomorrow night, I should have gained almost the entire extra ten pounds. I'll leave a tiny bit of space for that last cookie before bed.



© 2014 Mark Feggeler

The Can't-Opener

I'm not exactly sure why it is we have such trouble with can openers.

Cans have been around a long, long time. The modern canning process is roughly 200 years old. You'd think, then, since society has had so much time to perfect the art of packaging things up in all these cans, someone would have perfected an extraordinarily efficient and durable device for extricating said things from said cans. That way, when all I'm trying to prepare for dinner is a quick pasta with tomato sauce, I can easily get the sauce out of the can and into the pot.

But, by the time the pasta is well beyond al dente, I'm still fighting to get the battery-operated, self-rotating can opener to run long enough to make one full pass around the top of the can. After repositioning the demonic device for the twelfth time, it occurs to me I could have achieved faster results if I had taken the can outside and banged it against a rock, or a tree, or the driveway, or my head. Sure, a little sauce might have splattered here or there in the process, but at least it would no longer be in the can. Instead, I end up with an unopened can with three inch-long gashes at the top, none of which is large enough to allow sauce to pour out.

When it becomes clear the battery-operated, hand-held can opener will not live up to its name, I resort to the trusty manual can opener hiding in the back of the utensil drawer next to the meat pounder, just behind the micro-grater. I clamp the device to the top of the can and begin turning. Not only doesn't it open the can, the can itself isn't even moving. The blade is spinning in place, creating a slight indentation in the metal directly beneath it. So, I reposition the can opener, ensuring a firm metal-on-metal connection before wasting any more energy.

The pasta is now floating limply in its starchy broth and all I've managed to do so far is dent the top of the can and cut three hairline gashes along the outer edge of it with the electric device. Eventually, through herculian efforts involving massive amounts of denial, swearing, and a bloodied index finger, I manage to manipulate the manual can opener sufficiently to cause the top of the can to be in a state of what I will refer to as "mostly open."

I can see the sauce peeking at me. It's possible I could shake the can enough times to get most of the sauce out of the mostly open can, but I am a scraper. I'm not satisfied with the sauce retrieval process unless I can scrape the inner walls of the can with a spoon to ensure I leave no sauce behind.

One spot on the lid shows promise of giving way if I can twist the metal back and forth enough times to weaken it. I twist and turn, curse and mutter, cut another finger on the jagged edges left by the manual can opener, and with a final effort I manage to break the lid away. Sauce flies in all directions as I end up fist deep in the can. Countertop and backsplash are well-coated with pureed tomatoes, as am I.

Nevertheless, the can is open! I celebrate, hooting and hollering in the kitchen, declaring my caveman-like victory over the modern technology of the 19th Century, scraping gleefully with my spoon to retrieve every last drop of the precious puree. But we are entertaining guests, the pot on the stovetop is deep, and the sauce does not come close to filling it.

Only when I finish my scraping do I glance sideways. I take a deep breath, wipe the sauce from my wounds, and steel myself for the ensuing battle with the second can of sauce.


© 2012 Mark Feggeler