فلافل‎

My dreams of a decent dinner tonight are dissolving before my eyes. Little bits flake off the patties and float away, bubbling and convulsing in the hot oil. Only a few patties in, a layer of these charred flakes have descended to the bottom of the pan and formed a crusty layer, easily disturbed by any slight movement. Some of the patties are salvageable and we scoop them out and plop them down on the paper towel. A translucent splotch of grease slowly seeps radially outward and the deep red of the plate underneath struggles to shine through. Using the ladle I scoop up this sedimentary layer and throw it on the towel too, hovering a bit over the pan allowing excess grease to filter through the tiny holes of the ladle. It doesn't matter though; entropy reigns and the grease is just as much a part of the food as the main ingredient, perhaps in equal weight, too. We look down into the boiling morass, the same thoughts running through our heads. Any enlightened soul would see this slop and reject it utterly, but we delude ourselves and eat a little bit of it. What little flavor there was has been burned away, only the dry crunch and disguised grimace remain as our cognitive dissonance works overtime to make the night better.

 

The patties that escape the cauldron relatively intact are put in pitas and covered with a viscous light brown smattering of tahini and a couple slices of fresh-cut tomato. We take our seats and munch contently. All said, the ensemble is quite delicious, and is accented by a strange Japanese powdered green tea, with hints of salt and seaweed--really more of a soup than a tea. She stands up and walks to the kitchen to fetch something, and my eyes cannot look away. She moves slowly, her body sluggish after a weekend of hiking and rock climbing. She still has on a blue tank-top and shorts, her hair is done up in a simple pony-tail, tousled by wind and sweat. Everything about the way she looks and moves is honest, no move out of place, no unnecessary flourishes or embellishments, her face is free to shine radiantly without the need of a chemical filter. She turns around and her face droops with contented exhaustion. At this moment I have never seen someone more innocent or beautiful.

 

We don’t talk much as we eat. The charged crooning of Morissey permeates the room and I am overwhelmed with something beyond happiness. The half-finished pita is inches away from my mouth but I can’t raise it any further. Something has happened in my head, a valve releases some chemical which has laid patiently dormant my entire life. A wave passes over me, my skin tingles, my eyes look forward and go out of focus, and I enter true enrapturement, the like only heard of in obscure Eastern texts. My demeanor has changed so much she notices and asks what is the matter. I can’t explain. Maybe I didn’t have the words in the first place, maybe my entire being is now focused on her and can’t diagnose itself. I look deep into her eyes, dark bottomless pits hovering in the purest milk. I feel...good, I try to say. A bit of smile creeps to my face and she understands. We drop our food and fall into a deep embrace and for the moment we are fused. She kisses me, then I her. The same valve, as if taking an ethereal cue from my own, opens in her head and we are lost irrevocably.

 

Something is happening though, and the lips I’m kissing lose their pucker, the body I’m holding tight in my arms grows heavy. I pull back and look into her eyes, but they are barely open. The tell-tale head-bob and eyelid sag are evident: she’s desperately fighting sleepiness and losing. I smile and laugh, and lower her body to the couch. Almost instantly she is asleep. I come out of the worst of my emotional rapture and can once again summon my hands to finish eating. Once I’m full I gather the dishes together and hear a soft snoring coming from the couch. She’s even more beautiful asleep, sprawled out lackadaisical. My hands glide idly over the dishes as she dances in my head.

 

Thus begins my love affair with falafel, a traditional middle eastern food made primarily of garbanzo or fava beans. Really, the food is a canvas in which any cook can put in a variety of ingredients. That night I cooked a basic dish: beans, onion, garlic, cilantro, flour, and spices. Although the night ended in disaster this time, I would go on to make variations of it, each time improving the recipe. The second time I made them I found a different recipe, this one spicier than the last. The recipe called for “three or four” green chili peppers. I wanted to double the recipe so I bought eight peppers, having never tried them before or having any experience with them. I also found a recipe for a yogurt based sauce to help balance out the spiciness. Turning up the heat and adding more oil in the pan, along with adding more flour as a caking agent, the patties were less prone to falling apart. However as soon as I bit in I realized the power of these unassuming green peppers and my mouth began to burn. Relax, I told myself, that’s why I made the sauce. Next bite I made sure to cover the morsel with a good amount of the reddish-tinted yogurt. For the sauce, though, I used another ingredient I was less-than-familiar with: paprika. During the preparation I may have added a bit too much, and the sauce did nothing to help quell the fire in my mouth, in fact it may have accentuated it. I struggled to eat my fill and had to force myself to finish the batch over the course of a few days. I had made so much sauce that when the falafels were finished, over half the btach remained. I had to find alternative uses for it. She found out it was actually very tasty with cheerios. Eventually the harsh peppery, unique flavor became unbearable and the sauce languished in my refrigerator for a long time, until I finally scooped out the questionable material into the sink and washed it down the drain in a beautiful sunset-red spiral.

 

Despite my failures, I was enthralled with falafel, to its simple goodness and nutritional qualities. There are no unnecessary sugars, preservatives, cholesterol, or any of the common food vices. The originators probably did not have this in mind, they simply took what was around them and mashed it together and found it was quite sustainable, and tasty. That is how I like them, pure and simple. The joy of taking raw ingredients and fashioning them into a compact, elegant little brown ball is in some strange way thrilling. I am producing, creating, preserving. I am participating in the most basic life sustaining activity.

 

Over one Christmas break I wanted my parents to participate in my joy. On a particularly snowy winter day I gathered the ingredients for a basic dish, one that I had tasted before and figured they could tolerate. At that time I prepared the ingredients manually, without the use of any appliances. Mashing the wet garbanzo beans could be taxing at times, and the occasional stray projectile would shoot out and naturally roll under the refrigerator or some other hard-to-reach area. I made only a single batch, because I knew I was only cooking for two people, my mom and myself. My hope was that my father would get over his life-long revulsion to vegetables and anything besides meat and potatoes, finally taking a big bite out of healthiness. I made the mistake of not cutting the onions small enough to disguise the unmistakable smooth skin. Cooking onions removes the harsh raw flavor and instead leaves only sweetness which can accentuate any dish. Despite this, after the first bite, his eyes opened wide and his jaw stopped moving, and he asked if there were onions inside. I made the mistake of telling the truth and he immediately spit out the small bite he took. I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe that the magic the falafels give to me was hereditary and all it would take was that tiny catalyst to set him on the “right track” and at last we would clasp hands in taste solidarity. My mom and I finished the falafels that day, alone.

 

The day after school ended for the year I left for a two week camping/road trip in Joshua Tree and Sequoia National Parks. I didn’t want the burden of having to cook every night so I had the great idea of making two weeks worth of falafel I could munch on while out on trails and around the camp fire. She and I spent an entire day making falafels. We switched to a high-powered food processor to help grind up everything. What once was a process of endlessly smashing beans with a mallet turned into a simple press of a button. The garbanzo beans came out pureed, much finer than before, giving the falafels a nice smooth texture while still retaining that hearty crunchiness. Combined with pureed onions (the mixture of onions and cilantro makes a very appealing, albeit eye-watering, green tinted pudding), these falafels cooked much quicker, almost never broke apart in the oil, and came out crisp on the outside and delightfully moist on the inside. We took turns deep-frying them, collapsing on the couch after standing over the hot pan as waves of atomized grease saturated our faces. We had started our relationship with the joys of making falafels, and now having grown together the process became more utilitarian, but that magic of our first passionate night is awakened with every savory bite. We tripled our regular recipe, and when we finally exhausted our seemingly infinite supply, we had two and a half large ziplock bags of falafel balls.

 

Our first stop was the hot desert of Joshua Tree (named after the location’s massive abundance of its namesake) in Southeastern California. The summer was only just starting but Joshua Tree was already breaking 100 degrees. The heat proved too much for hiking and our days were spent mostly trying to find shade wherever we could. My car had no shade and the temperature inside was perhaps ten degrees higher than outside. We had no other place to store our food except in the back seat. On the second day a strange deathly smell permeated the car. We hunted everywhere and found it came from pancakes we had made a few days before. The smell had a tangy citrus quality, in no way appealing. We threw away the pancakes and hoped the rest of our foods would not go that fast. The falafels were still fine; onion and garlic are supposedly two natural preservatives.

 

We conceded to the heat after only two days and continued our trip to Sequoia National Park in Central California. The weather was much cooler high in the Sierra Nevadas, 4000 feet higher in elevation than Joshua Tree. Our campsite was right on the edge of a river and small patches of snow still survived under the perpetual shade. In only a few hours the temperature dropped 40 or more degrees for us. As we bedded down for the night, we moved all our food into “bear boxes” so that the bears wouldn’t come hunting for the easy-to-acquire fatty human food. The ziplock bags had condensation lining the inside, and a new smell appeared in the car and mixed with the lingering rotten pancake smell, this one soap-like and understandably unpleasant. Was our shampoo rotting? Is that even possible? Each of us ate a few falafel balls and fell asleep to the soothing sound of the river rushing only a few feet away.

 

The falafels came with us everywhere on the trails. They were our breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, our main food source. I was afraid they wouldn’t last the whole trip we were devouring them that fast, but I never anticipated the future. Our second night at the campsite I grabbed a ball and took a bite. Thin tendrils stretched from my mouth to the ball and I sensed a strange taste. She tasted it too: the same soapy flavor as the new smell in the car. Oh great, somehow we spilled shampoo in the falafel bags! How was that possible? There were no signs of leakage, we didn’t even keep the two things close together. We opened other bags and tasted other balls: same thing. They had rotten. I finished my one ball through sheer willpower, she couldn’t get halfway. A momentary crisis gripped us. We can’t possibly eat all these, they’ll just get worse and we’ll starve in this beautiful forest! We brought other food, some chips, candy bars, a loaf of bread and some almond butter, but nothing that could sustain us. That night though we had to rely on the junk food. Out bellies were somewhat full and we didn’t fret too much about the future. We decided to toss the entire batch: two bags remaining of the two and a half we made. Only a fifth of our effort was rewarded, the rest tossed into a giant dumpster and left to rot in peace.

 

We survived though, our neighbors recognized our foolhardiness and slyly donated some food, which we gladly accepted. In the middle of the park an unsightly tourist trap had grown, complete with a rudimentary grocery store within walking distance. We bought overpriced packages of veggie burgers along with more junk food and other impulse buys, as is required with any tourist destination. Still the painful memory of that heavy bear-proof lid sliding over our creation--cut down so early in life—lingered on.

 

We recovered. We cooked more, improved the recipe, added carrots, tried out different types of flour, hosted parties, sold them at a food co-op. Life went on and that bitter soapy taste was overpowered by natural goodness. Falafel is perhaps my favorite food. If I’m at a food court, I hunt out the ubiquitous Greek place and buy a falafel gyro. If I'm going to have a party, the guests better be ready to cram them down their throats. Falafel brings me closer to one of the very essences of life, the three things we must do to survive as a species: eat, sleep, and procreate. The latter two are already loved by all, but my culture has grown disconnected with food. For many, the first contact they have with food is when their fork brings it to their mouths. To me, my connection with food is sharing it with the people I love, it’s mixing the onion mixture with the ground garbanzo beans and feeling it squeeze between my naked fingers, it’s the feeling of loss and hopelessness when food is wasted by antiquated tastes and the ravages of time. I don’t have the same connection of those who planted the beans and watched them sprout and grow tall, not everyone can have that. Everyone can cook though. Everyone can strengthen that last leg of life. It’s thrilling to finally indulge in them all (most of the time in succession) and to feel how good they complement each other. To eat, to make love, to sleep, and to do it all over again day after day is a pleasure and a right to us all, and to deny oneself even one of these things is to cut out what makes life possible.