Three Things

Hi! Did you need dinner to be nutritious and delicious and also cheap? I’ve got you. My wonderful father-in-law sent us home with tzatziki from the good yogurt place, so I decide to make falafel, only then I didn’t have eight hours to soak the chickpeas and so I googled “red lentil falafel,” and lifted the bones of the recipe from here. (If you give a mouse a cookie.) I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to making it with chickpeas, which I realize is total BLASPHEMY coming from me, but there you go.

These are so easy and tender and crunchy and garlicky and herby and just perfect in every way. I made them twice in five days. I serve them with pickled red cabbage and tzatziki. If I’m making the tzatziki from scratch, I use this recipe, but these days I grate little unpeeled persian cukes instead of peeling and dicing a big cuke, and I salt it and squeeze out the extra liquid before stirring it into the yogurt. Also I don’t always put herbs in my tzatziki any more.

Red Lentil Falafel
This serves 3 people for dinner or 4 people for lunch or just me in a world where I go for it and eat the whole batch. If you added pita maybe it would serve more people.

1 cup red lentils

2 teaspoons kosher salt

½ cup or so chopped onion

3 minced garlic cloves

1 cup chopped cilantro and/or parsley (or up to double this amount)

1 teaspoon each cumin and coriander, ideally whole spices toasted and then freshly ground (I got my mortar and pestle from Marshall’s) or else the powder straight from the jar like a normal person

½ teaspoon cayenne or other red pepper or more or less or none

2 tablespoon chickpea flour

½ teaspoon baking powder

Oil for shallow frying (ideally something with a high smoke point (??) like grapeseed or avocado)

1. Put the lentils in a bowl and cover them generously with cold water from the tap. Soak them between 1 and 2 hours at room temperature, then drain them well.

2. In a food processor, blitz the lentils with the salt, onion, garlic, herbs, and spices until the lentils break down into a texture kind of like chunky wet sand (??). It will start off very coarse and then get finer and you don’t want it to become a full-on paste, although if it does don’t even worry about it, it will be fine.

3. Scrape the mixture into a bowl, stir in the flour and baking powder, then cover and chill for an hour or two, which will firm it up enough for scooping.

4. Use a cookie scoop to grab up loose balls of the mixture and flatten them slightly before placing them on a pice of wax paper on a plate or baking sheet. Don’t worry if they seem fragile. Any size is good, but flatter is better for shallow-frying and smaller is better for the ratio of crisp to tender, without any raw onion flavor lingering in the middle. You can chill them again at this point if you want to—or else just fry them now. Put some paper towel on a cooling rack and put the rack on a rimmed baking sheet.

5. Use a very large frying pan (or else you’ll need to do this in batches): pour in enough oil to generously cover your bottom (!!) and turn the heat to medium/medium-high. Wait for the oil to get very hot (I dip the edge of a patty into it and if it does not sizzle with absolute conviction I wait another minute and try again), then put all the patties in. Fry until deeply browned on the bottom, something like 3 or 4 or 5 minutes, then flip them and fry until deeply browned on the other side. Remove them to the cooling rack and serve immediately.

Also on offer today is the best iced tea in the world! It’s just good, strong black tea (I usually brew a bag of Trader Joe’s Irish Breakfast tea in around 3/4 cup of just-boiled water for 3 minutes) poured over ice and then you add a drop of rose water. This is something I’ve been making since 2020, when someone (Who? I don’t know!) posted a picture of their iced Oolong tea with rose water. Oolong is great—smoky and strange—but I almost never have it. What I do have right now is this delicious Publisher’s Blend Murchie’s black tea that someone gifted me at an event. (Who? I don’t know!) By the way, you can get culinary-grade rose water at a Middle Eastern or Indian grocery store or probably at Whole Foods. A drop of vanilla is a different good addition to a glass of iced tea, and vanilla in Oolong definitely gives whiskey vibes.

Next up, a few recs that I guess I’m counting as one thing?

I had the great blessing of getting to watch an early cut of my friend Julie’s incredible film The Tallest Dwarf last year, and I loved it SO MUCH. It’s my favorite kind of documentary, where you learn a ton about the world but the whole experience is shaped by the filmmaker’s personal journey. At the end of a very long kvelling email I sent her, I wrote, “It's profound and entertaining and hopeful and just gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.” You can watch it now and should.

“I read this book cover to cover, and it was so hot and delicious, so funny and smart and real, and the dialogue was so great, and the sex was so steamy and uncringe that I want to study it.” That’s what I said about this Rainbow Rowell chunk of deliciousness. I loved it.

Finally, I wanted to recommend the TV show DTF Saint Louis, which is dark and funny and constantly surprising and also deeply moving and sad. I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered quite so heartbreaking a representation of everyday loneliness. Wowza. I’m sorry in advance if it’s not your cuppa, but it was definitely mine.

Thank you so much for being here. Life isn’t always easy, but boy do we get to laugh a lot.