Bring the falafel

I studied abroad in Jordan last year and became quite accustomed to eating falafel. Luckily for me, our neighborhood chain grocery store sells a small selection of falafel mixes. For the brand that I bought, you have to let the mix sit in water for 30 minutes (it's that planning ahead requirement that always causes me to stumble).

The frying requires both a lot of oil and a bit more time and attention than I really wanted to spend (although that's my problem with cooking in general). For the most part, the patties stayed together well and did not fall apart.

They were a bit spicy to me, but nothing some yogurt couldn't fix.

I brought this snack to several meetings of my thesis seminar and my colleagues were thrilled, which is good because they probably weren't thrilled to listen to me explain regulatory takings jurisprudence.

In other international food news, my roommates (all of whom are Hawaiian and/or Asian), have been cooking up some delicious appetizers. These seaweed wraps (made lovingly for the new freshmen from Hawaii) took a looong afternoon and evening to make, but were addictive.

How do you like them apples?

Staring at the leftover brown sugar in my cupboard for several weeks inspired me to bake a few apples.

I looked up a recipe on AllRecipes.com to see what we were up against, and was surprised to see that it really isn't that hard. I just glanced at one of the easy looking recipes and don't even remember which one.

What I used:

A rectangular ceramic baking dish

Apples (I'm sure it's possible to do this with any size, but the larger the better)

Brown sugar

Walnuts

Cranberries

The first step is to core the apples. I don't have a corer so I hacked away with a regular chopping knife. Not ideal, but it worked just fine.

Next, I mixed together the brown sugar, cranberries, and walnuts. Some of the recipes call for nutmeg and orange peel, and most list raisins instead of cranberries, but college cooking is all about using whatever's on hand, and those three items were what I had.

I didn't even keep track of amounts. I had about 11 apples and I used all of them. I also used up all of my brown sugar and that was about half a bag. For the other things, I just stirred together a dry mixture that I thought looked good. I placed the apples in my ceramic cooking dish and packed them as tightly as possible with the dry mixture.

The recipe that I was working off of says that you should boil a pot of water on the stove while prepping the apples. I did that and then poured about a half an inch of boiling water into the pan.

The idea behind the water is that it keeps the apples from drying out while they bake for about 30 minutes, and that sometime around the halfway mark you should use the liquid to baste the apples.

{Whoa, hold up! I just used the word 'baste'. You'd think this was a 100 level class or something. As I understand it, basting is when you cook something in juice or sauce and dribble that same sauce on the food item before/during/after the cooking process. You can get fancy basting brushes, but I just used a spoon to dribble the sugary hot water over the apples after 15 minutes in the oven and then again when I took them out at the end.}

I only used the 30-35 minutes as a guide, and took them out when the apples were soft and I could easily slip a fork into each one (and when I was hungry and had lost interest in staring at the oven). They were very good!