Falafel Fluke

My co-worker, Magda, is an amazing cook. She is from the Sudan and makes the *best* Mediterranean food: hummus, baba ganoush, falafel, baklava, everything. Earlier this week, Magda shared her falafels and they were to die for! She told me how she prepared a huge batch of chickpeas and onions for the falafels and froze them, so she can prepare small batches easily, just by adding seasonings and cooking them. Being the sweetheart that she is, Magda brought me a batch the following day.

Katie and I were planning a happy hour and when I heard the falafel news, I completely changed plans. I invited her over for dinner (even though my apartment was a disaster), asked her to bring some hummus and tabbouleh, tasked Lane with going to the store, and I promised to go home early to do some dishes and clean up a little. And all day I daydreamed about how delightful the falafels would taste. Perfect plan, right?

I got on the shuttle and forgot to bring my falafel mix!!! I had to get up and ask the drive to just let me off on the corner. I went back, thinking about how this was cutting down on my dishes time, grabbed the bag out of the fridge, and on my way back down, poked my head in just to make sure and got this horrible whiff of stinky old fish. Not my bag! So I rushed back up and scoured the whole fridge, only to find my falafel mix GONE!

I was completely crushed. Not only had I been looking forward to this all day, I had told my friend all about it, she was buying dinner things specifically to eat with falafels, and now we were going to be eating our non-falafel dinner in a non-cleaned apartment as well, if I didn’t get home asap and figure out what the heck we’d be eating.

So what did I do? I went to farmers market and bought some tomatoes for my dinner on Saturday and some peaches for dessert. Lane got home before I did, luckily, and man, we are the fastest emergency cleaners this side of the Mississippi! It was all cleaned before Katie arrived and we had salmon patties and salad for dinner instead.

So today, as soon as I got to work I looked for my falafel mix hoping some sweet soul realized how important that Ziploc bag full of crushed garbanzo beans was and had thoughtfully returned it. Nope. Even sadder. But somehow, my goods showed up in the fridge around 2 pm. I don’t know how, but I’m happy and I’m going to give this whole falafel thing another whirl sometime this week – tonight, if I’m lucky.