Tuesday evening – What a Fal-awful Idea

For lunch, I thought it was worth trying something a little different. They say that variety is the spice of life, and like all other spices variety is largely banned this week, but there’s still a little room for manoeuvre.

I figured it was worth trying to make falafel, which is largely a chickpea based dish. A quick Google yielded the following ingredients for a decent falafel:

·         Chickpeas

·         Onion

·         Parsley

·         Garlic

·         Flour

·         Cumin

·         Coriander

·         Pepper

·         Cardamom

And now here is that list again, with the ingredients I’m not allowed removed:

·         Chickpeas

So I do at least have the basics, namely the chickpeas. I’ll just have to make a few substitutions along the way for the ingredients I don’t have, such as everything else.

Fakelafels

Ingredients: chickpeas, porridge oats, relentless optimism.

1.       Cook the chickpeas in the microwave until you’re bored of waiting for them to finish. Mash them with a fork until you either run out of chickpeas to mash or run out of forks.

If you squint it at, you can pretend it's cornflakes. Cornflakes that somebody has liberally strewn whole chickpeas into, but I'll take it.

2.       Make a small amount of porridge using the classic Tuesday morning recipe.

No, I haven't just carpeted the bottom of my Pyrex jug, although I can see why you'd think that.

3.       Combine chickpeas and porridge together. Wonder whether you’ve made a terrible mistake.

4.       Realise that the porridge is sticking the chickpeas together like the flour is supposed to and you actually have a food with structure. Briefly rejoice.

5.       Take a small handful of the mixture and then remember that the mixture contains hot porridge and quickly return the small handful of mixture.

6.       Wait for a couple of minutes.

7.       Try again.

8.       Place the balls of odd mixture on a baking tray.

It's a slight toss-up as to whether the baking tray or its contents are more palatable.

9.       Realise that you should have preheated the oven before starting. If you have a time machine, retrospectively add this as point 1. Otherwise, invent a time machine and then follow the previous sentence. Or just turn the oven on at this point and wait for it to heat up, but I reckon the time machine is easier.

10.   Put the tray in the oven at an undetermined temperature for an undetermined length of time. (The undetermined temperature is due to the fact that the temperature knob on my oven isn’t screwed in properly and gives you a temperature with error bars of around 30 degrees either side. The undetermined time is because I had no idea how long they should take so just waited until I got hungry)

11.   Remove tray from oven.

You can tell that this is a different picture to before because the baking tray has moved to somewhere with slightly more lighting.

12.   Realise that everything is sort of stuck to the tray, and also that the tray is hot.

13.   Shovel what you can onto a plate.

Remarkably, this recipe seemed to actually go relatively well, all things considered. The food was definitely still fairly flavourless (this is probably due to the fact that it only consists of chickpeas and oats) but the outside was a little crispy so it didn’t feel quite so much like chomping through soil. And although I wasn’t particularly fala-full after eating it, I didn’t feel quite as fala-foolish as I thought I might have done for trying this. Indeed, I was expecting it to be somewhat of a complete mess, and actually I might even consider making this again later in the week.

Probably not after Friday, though. Not unless I need to bore somebody to death and my conversation isn’t quite cutting it.

My evening meal, which I have just finished, followed the more traditional route of rice and beans. The bean of choice here was the borlotti bean (aka Bertie Lott’s Zero Flavour Beans). As far as beans go, it’s a fairly decent one – it’s a variety of kidney bean so has a similar sort of consistency, and probably would be very nice with any sort of seasoning. It complements the rice well, in that both are wholly unremarkable in their taste – to the point where if the Rice or Borlotti families are reading this, both will be surprised that their taste has managed to get an entire sentence, even if most of that sentence is dedicated to pointing that fact out.

Finally, we come to John Craving’s Newsround. It’s a short one today, as I still haven’t really hit any massive cravings at the moment. Having only just finished dinner I’m still a bit hungry, and I suspect that later in the evening I may land my first craving for something tastier than rice. But for now, things aren’t too bad.

I continue to be amazed and humbled by the generosity shown by those around me, be it through donating, through kind words and prayers or simply by reading through the ramblings that I write each day to keep me sane. So thank you for your support!

As the week continues, I suspect my inspiration for topics to write about will start to run a little thin, and therein the real rambling begins. If there’s anything that you think would be interesting for me to write about, then do let me know – I’m always happy for writing prompts.

 Note: As part of my Mean Bean challenge I will be writing about my experiences each day – the more money raised, the more I write. At the time of writing, people have generously donated £290, which means I’m aiming at 1,650 words per day (excluding the ones in this explanatory paragraph). This will hopefully come in two posts, one in the morning and one in the evening. If you would like these posts to get even longer, and support the excellent work of Tearfund at the same time, please click here.