'Member I said there was a market attached to that Iraqi restaurant? We bought a box of falafel mix, "a Lebanon Valley prod." To make it, we are to:
1--Add water same volume of FALAFEL powder and mix well, keep it about 120 minutes.
2--Make it balls by dipping the hand with water.
3--Fry the balls into cooking oil only, (very high temperature) balls must be completely covered by cooking oil.
4--Serve the FALAFEL with fresh vegetables and tahina sauce. NOTE: Please add onion and Garlic as request order.

Falafel, by the way, is ground spiced chickpeas and fava beans shaped into balls and fried.
You can get it at Greek restaurants, and it is REALLY GOOD!

its one of my favorite lunches, 3 or 4 falafal balls, lightly crushed, in a whole wheat pita (pocket bread, with shreaded lettuce and chopped tomato, garnishes with "white sause" a mixture of lemon juice and tahani (seseme paste--think of peanut butter made from crushed sememe seeds) -- $2.75! bought from a ny city falafal guy, a street vender.

some times i go all out and get the rice, salad and falafal platter, with a hot pita bread on the side, for $4.25. What a lunch.

the falafal guys use a ice cream type scoop to make the falafal balls, and they are done when they are a deep golden brown. lots of stores carry tahini, and you can use the tahini to make humas, too.

take a 1 16 ounce can of chick peas, drained, dump in food processor, with some fresh parsley, and 1 to 3 cloves of garlic (to taste) puree, and then add tahini paste, lemon juice, black pepper, and puree till smooth (how much tahini paste? any where from 1/4 cup to 1/12 cup) you can do it in a blender, (just do half at a time) serve in a dish, and scoop up with pita bread (as a meal or as an 1st course)
tahini paste, like peanut butter is high fat, (good fat, but still high) more make a creamier milder dish, less, a slightly drier, lower calorie, beanier spread.
(yes, that was a recipe, an no, i have no shame, and i don't care!)

what is so interesting is how different falafal taste from humas, and yet they have are both mostly chickpeas. (with garlic, parsley and tahini, (on incorporated, one as a garnish))

I love arabic food. Last night I had fatoosh http://www.saladrecipe.com/AZ/Ftsh.asp, a fried kibbee[childhood memories, *sigh]http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/recipes/meat/lamb/mp-lamb-coll.html#5, a falafel sandwich and jasmine flavored rice pudding

I see you buy the same brand of falafel mix as I do.

I tried it once, but decided not to get any more after it made me falafel.

(apologies to ted)

Dody, if you were talking to me--it's pretty good, isn't it? My huggy fixed it, while I ran an errand. He said that once he started using the melon-baller, it was...er...a piece of cake, so to speak.

Now--Consuelo, obviously you lived long enough to make this post, so I am guessing that the sumac powder listed in your fatoosh recipe must not be the only sumac I know of, which is poison. In the restaurant, another customer asked what spice had been used in whatever she was eating, and I thought the guy said sumac; but I couldn't believe I'd heard correctly.

There's sumac:

http://res2.agr.ca/ecorc/poisivy/poisume.html

and there's sumac

http://www.arabia.com/life/article/english/0,11827,99400,00.html

This second link makes mention of poison sumac and how to tell the difference. The one with fuzzy red berries is the North American version of the spice sumac and makes a delicious tea. Many like to add ungodly amounts of sugar in order to overcome the rather tart flavor of the NA sumac.

Thanks, Faldage--maybe I'll try some. It sure is widespread over there, isn't it? Your article had an intriguing link: "Aussie jellyfish suppers now sought in Asia".

You mean I could have eaten the one that got me! I like my revenge served deep fried.

Harper's magazine years ago published some excerpts from a book of illustrated palindromes - each one a funny little row of words with a nice pen and ink sketch to accompany it.

One of my favorites was a picture of an extremely bored-looking fellow in a long trenchcoat, smoking a cigarette and staring disaffectedly at a little bush in the distance.

Can you guess the palindrome?

I won't have time to plug in the answer later, so I'll put it here: Camus sees sumac.