Foodbuzz Festival Fill-In: Falafel on a Waffle

As I told you yesterday, I’m in San Francisco (barring catastrophe*) for the Foodbuzz Festival.
*Knock on wood.I’m busy attending sessions, trying to fit in “tourist time,” attending the Tasting Pavilion this afternoon, the Awards Gala this evening, and probably being somewhat ridiculous in my usual way in order to get my photo taken with Tyler Florence….he may not be Adam Richman, but he’s pretty darn cute.
I am not, however, blogging. Yes, it is a blogger conference, and probably everyone else will be”blogging live,” but I have an ancient computer that turns off if you unplug it (or sometimes even when it is plugged in), so that will not be an option for me. I’ll bring my card reader and maybe you’ll get lucky, but for now, I give you a post I wrote for Laura, my lovely roommate at the festival, during her trip to Italy. If you missed “Falafel on a Waffle” the first time, I hope you enjoy it now. If you read it then…read it again.

Over on my blog [slash] in my “real life” I’m working on tackling a number of cooking and eating ‘feats’ as part of my Culinary Bucket List. One of those was to “start with dried beans” in a recipe. But after successfully making (and baking) a relatively ‘traditional’ [sans frying in oil, of course] falafel, I couldn’t get an idea out of my head: Why stop with just falafel, when you could have falafel…

…on a WAFFLE!?

This recipe pretty much encapsulates me as a blogger: a mindset focused on “playing with my food” and a tendency towards the seemingly bizarre that somehow just…works. The fact that I was fixated on making a dish simply because it rhymed…well that just shows how I constantly feel like a small child trapped in a 27-year-old’s body.

Also, I am obsessed with my food processor.

Although I could have just eaten my Baked Falafel on the not-to-sweet waffles I had purchased, I just had to be difficult (as usual) and reinvent the wheel. If there are chickpea fritters for afternoon and evening…why not bean balls for breakfast?

2 cups of chickpeas, soaked overnight* + 1/2 cup mashed banana + spices + honey

*Alton Brown says for falafel you must used soaked, uncooked garbanzos. I’m not going to tell him if you cheat.
Process until smooth…scraping the sides once or twice as necessary.
Once the dough starts to stick, you’re ready! It will be pretty wet and goopy.
Set up a Henry Ford-inspired assembly line with a small bowl of flour in between your processor and your sheet pan.*
*Or your cutting board…if you are embarrassed by the state of your sheet pans and don’t particularly want to photograph them.Roll the Banana Falafel in the flour, just to get a light coating to hold them together.
Bake on a coated baking sheet for about 20 minutes at 350 degrees. The tops won’t brown too much…
…but their bottoms will brown quite nicely.*
*Anyone else just get an image of the Coppertone sunscreen bottle with the baby and her bum?…No?

What’s Falafel on a Waffle without syrup, though?

Or in this case….Ta-honey Sauce?

Let’s just say…this is a breakfast worth eating.

And repeating.*

“Falafel on a Waffle”