Falafel

I paired these allergy friendly falafels with my Gluten Free Egg Free Dairy Free Wraps and my Mango Sauce to make a delicious sandwich wrap. Topped with fresh lettuce, diced cucumber, and chunks of orange bell pepper they will definitely have you thinking about fresh spring days.

Whether you are looking for a healthy lunch, or a meatless meal, these falafels have enough flavor to appeal to almost any palate at your table. Made from chickpeas, falafels are a Middle Eastern food traditionally deep fried and served by street vendors in pitas or on a flatbread and topped with fresh or pickled vegetables. The thing I love about falafels is they are super allergy friendly. This recipe did not require any creative substitutions, other than replacing a few tablespoons of flour in the recipe with a gluten free flour.

I also skipped the deep frying and baked these on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. I love fried foods, and I used to enjoy fried falafels, but I have an aversion to actually frying foods in my own kitchen. I hate cleaning up the mess, I feel like I always end up with a hazy cloud throughout my entire house, and I feel like I am coated with a layer of grease by the time I finish. Maybe it is just the way I learned to cook ( I don't remember my mom ever frying anything when I was growing up.) My attempts at frying foods are generally the way we test to see if our smoke detectors are working, and it is generally frowned upon by 'mister works from home'.

I remember when we first got married, my in-laws came to visit for Easter. My mother-in-law was determined to have a 'decent fish fry' even though she was far from home. This meant she fried fish in my less than adequate frying pan in our tiny little apartment. My husband grew up with more fried foods than I did, so I thought it might be a learning experience. What I learned was that my mother-in-law also ended up with everything breaking apart in the pan, a smoking frying pan, and a haze in the air that had us scrambling to open every window and door in the place, despite our ten foot high ceilings in the old historic building we lived in. I went to bed that night feeling like I had after a long shift at McDonald's when I was a teenager.

When these came out of the oven the hubby had three of them gone before they even got near the wraps or the plates. It was a good reminder that falafels can make a great appetizer or even a snack.

Here's the recipe. It makes 20 small falafels. I Put 3 falafels in each wrap. but everyone had at least 2 wraps. You can easily double the recipe, and these freeze really well. You have a great quick meal when you can just pull these falafels and Gluten Free Egg Free Dairy Free Wraps out of the freezer.

Enjoy!