This is a ‘quick’ recipe I made up which turned out to be so good that I made it twice in a week, so I had to share it on here. I’m going to split it up into two stages because the first stage you can do well in advance. First we’ll make the falafels. A few months ago I made a huge batch of ~ 30 falafels. They’re great, they store fine in the freezer and only take ~ 10 minutes to cook. Very handy if you’ve run out of food like the day I made this up.

Falafels

Ingredients

I’ve tried a few recipes before, this one from The World Food Cafe is the best I’ve found though, it serves 4-6.

• 1 tin chickpeas (225 g dry)
• 2 pitta breads or 2 slices of dry bread
• 1 large onion, coarsely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves
• 2 dsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp ground chilli
• 2 dsp plain flour
• 1 tsp salt
• handful of chopped parsley
• sesame seeds

Method

1. Using a food processor, make breadcrumbs from the bread.
2. Add everything apart from the chickpeas and sesame seeds, blend to a paste.
3. Add chickpeas, with water/more breadcrumbs if needed.
4. Roll into 1″ balls, coat in sesame seeds.

These will happily freezer for several months. To cook, just take them out a fry in sunflower oil until golden.

Constructing the Wraps

I found some massive multi-seed wraps on sale which I gave a try, I thought the size of them worked really well. I also bought some Moroccan-style Houmous (which Alice recommended).

Ingredients

Jenny and I ate two each, you could probably get away with one if you eat ‘normal’ portions. This is what I used for two wraps:

• 2 Wraps
• 3 Falafels
• 2 tbsp Tahini
• 3 tbsp Moroccan Houmous (or you could add something like Harissa paste to normal Houmous)
• 1 x Boiled Egg
• Cheddar Cheese
• Salad Leaves (Spinach?)

Method

1. If you haven’t already, fry your falafels until golden.
2. Spread a tbsp of tahini just south of the equator of the wrap, taking up 2/3 rds of the width.
3. Layer 1.5 crushed falafels on top
4. Top with Houmous, Egg, Cheese then Salad
5. Fold in the sides, Cover with the bottom, roll.
6. (Optionally) slice in half if you don’t want to look greedy

Roll out the dough into mini pizza bases, place on a baking sheet. Lightly fry some chopped shallots and mushrooms. We used some tinned artichoke – make sure you rinse these thoroughly or they’ll taste quite salty. Since we’re in Wiltshire we used some Wiltshire ham. Add it all and stick it in a 200C oven for 25 mins. We had ours cold but it’s probably a lot nicer slightly warmed.

This recipe is a king of thrift and simplicity. Quite often if we’re making a quick meal utilising some time saving pie technology (shop bought pastry) we end up with a surplus of puff or shortcrust. We’ve started trying to use it up by making lunch time snacks.

There really wasn’t much to it – roll out the pastry into rectangles roughly 6″ X 8″, fairly thin. Fry up some onion. I used some off-cuts of Salmon which are signifcantly cheaper than the nice slices – you don’t need pretty pieces for a pie. Just shred them up a bit if needed. We added some crumbled Feta, we always seem to have some feta in the fridge (cos it lasts ages). Stuff it all in one half of the rectangle, fold and seal using your fingers. Poke a couple of slits in the top, stick it in the oven for ~ 15mins. Done.

They tasted fairly nice. If we’d planned it beforehand I’d probably substitute the Feta, it was slightly too salty. Goats cheese and add some spinach could work.

Since sundried tomatoes are dry, I soaked them in water for a while and used some of the infused liquid to moisten the paste.