Cardamom and Tea

I’ve been posting so many breakfast things to my Instagram story this week. I’d like to say it’s because I’m really good at curating social media content to coordinate with my semi-weekly blog posts (hah!), but it’s really just that breakfast has been on my mind. Now that we have big south-east-facing bedroom windows, I’m actually becoming a morning person, and (since my life revolves around food) that means becoming a breakfast person.

But “morning person” is a relative term, and so for me, breakfast must be easy, which means that it needs to be something you can make ahead the night before, or something you can quickly throw together in the morning. And this rule especially applies when hosting friends for a morning brunch, which is why I put together this easy vegetarian breakfast meze. The prep time takes only thirty minutes the night before, and thirty minutes the morning of. And best of all, most of the things on the menu don’t even require real cooking, but it still looks like you tried.

Download a printable PDF of recipes + shopping lists

* This shakshuka recipe makes 4 eggs, so multiply as necessary. With a large spread like this, estimate 1 egg per person for a medium breakfast, 2 eggs per person for a filling breakfast. If you’re making this menu for 4 people, just make a single batch of everything, and expect to have some leftovers of everything but the shakshuka. If you’re multiplying for a larger party of 6 to 8, make one batch of everything, but multiply the shakshuka by 3, and be sure to buy enough bread, olives, and strawberries.

Grocery list

pantry
salt and olive oil
pita bread and/or English muffins*
orange marmalade
orange blossom water
14.5 ounce can diced tomatoes (buy 2 cans if you’re doubling the shakshuka, 3 for tripling)

produce
olives (castelvetranos from the olive bar are always a crowd pleaser)*
strawberries, or your favorite fruit*
1 head garlic
1 bunch dill
5 Persian cucumbers
1 small yellow or orange bell pepper
5 roma tomatoes
1 small red onion
1 lemon
1 bunch parsley

dairy
1 stick butter
eggs (1 or 2 eggs per person)
8 ounces cream cheese
16 ounces small curd cottage cheese

frozen
1 lb bag frozen corn
1 lb bag frozen lima beans (or another shell bean, like soy or fava)

* Make sure you buy enough bread, olives, and strawberries for the number of guests.

schedule

The night before (25 minutes)

Make jajik and plate it.
Stir 1 tablespoon of orange blossom water into a jar of orange marmalade.
Plate the olives.
Wash the strawberries and place them in a bowl.
Make the shakshukotash’s tomato sauce in a non-reactive (e.g., stainless steel) pot. Multiply the recipe as needed.
Refrigerate everything overnight.
Set the table.

The morning of (30 minutes)

Cover the pita bread in foil and place in a 200°F oven for about 15 minutes, just to warm it through.
Make the Jerusalem salad (If you don’t have time to wait around, don’t worry about letting it sit with the salt. Just use less salt, about 1/4 teaspoon).
Get all the food on the table before you start cooking the eggs.
Add 1 or 2 tablespoons of water to the shakshukotash sauce, bring it back up to a simmer, and poach the eggs in it. If you’re doubling the recipe, divide the sauce between 2 skillets to poach the eggs (if you’re tripling, use 3 skillets, or just 2 really wide ones). Serve immediately.

Falafel is hard to turn into a weeknight meal without losing its heart and soul. It takes a really long time for chickpeas to soak, and falafel is nothing if not made from raw, soaked legumes (usually chickpeas or fava beans). And on top of all that, deep frying is kind of a pain. With all the soaking and deep frying, it’s a labor of love. Going to all that trouble just to make a falafel salad might seem a little overwhelming.

So naturally, in an effort to make falafel a little easier to manage, many food bloggers and recipe writers have glossed over these two important steps. But unfortunately, if you bake balls of cooked chickpeas, you’re going to end up with mushy, slightly charred blobs of tahiniless hummus. If you try to convince me that this bizarro falafel is tasty, you might get somewhere (except no, not really), but if you try to convince me that chickpea mush balls are falafel, I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

But that doesn’t mean that there’s no room for shortcuts. It’s just about finding the right shortcut. In this post, I’ve decided to tackle the question of frying: is it possible to make good falafel that are baked instead of deep fried? The answer is absolutely yes, but you have to do a few things differently.

The usual recipes for baked falafel never ever deliver the same crunchiness as the real deal. This is because it’s really hard to evenly coat the balls in oil before baking, and (even if you coat everything as evenly as possible) an oven will never bake as evenly as a deep frier. Furthermore, most recipes that ask you to bake falafel are trying to develop a “healthier” low-fat version, which is just not going to make them as crunchy as they should be.

I make no claim that my baked falafel crumbles are “healthier” than deep fried falafel, because I don’t think that fried food is inherently unhealthy to begin with, and besides, my recipe is nowhere near fat free. But it is a whole lot easier, and results in a flavor and texture very similar to the real deal. As long as you remember to throw those chickpeas in some baking soda water the night before, crunchy, delicious falafel crumbles are within reach with just 15 active minutes the next day.

In my recipe for falafel crumbles, you soak some chickpeas overnight, blend up a batch of falafel mix, oil a sheet pan, evenly spread out the mixture, drizzle it with a bit more oil, and roast it. Then instead of just mixing everything up halfway through baking, you try to keep everything as whole as possible by flipping spatula-sized sections (a trick I learned from Deb Perelman’s extra chunky granola). By doing this, you end up with some super crunchy bits and some soft, steamed bits, as if you took a real falafel and chopped it up after deep frying. This means that as long as you’re okay with crumbles instead of balls, you don’t have to stand over the deep fryer, cooking batch after batch. Plus, crumbles are perfect for sprinkling over a salad and drizzling with tahini-lemon sauce. So enjoy this falafel salad recipe, with less fuss.