Sunday: Falafel and co

Whenever I see a falafel recipe I think: "mmmm, falafel... I should give that a try." but somehow never have. I'm not sure why, but this recipe from food52 pushed me over the activation barrier.

I stuck pretty closely to the recipe (though I only made a half recipe), the only real variation was that I used parsley instead of cilantro (somehow it didn't seem right to use 'tro) and fried them in a mixture of olive and peanut oils. Really nice stuff... we'll make these, along with the tzatziki, again.

I made pita bread to accompany the falafel following the recipe in the Bread Bible. Without a stand mixer, these were a fair amount of work, but they were quite good.

Other accompaniments:

• Something like baba ganouj: eggplant roasted under the broiler, then peeled, chopped, and food-processed with garlic paste (allowed to cure with the salt for 10-15 minutes), tahini, and olive oil. I left the lemon juice and cumin out this time because the flavor and richness of the eggplant was great as is.
• Roasted bell peppers (yellow and red) tossed with salt and some of the olive oil used to cook the onions and potatoes for the tortilla last week (that's a remarkable ingredient to have around).
• A big pile of lettuce.