Sweet Potato Falafel With Hummus

Hello, hello!

I'm trying to get better about posting more stuff on here, but I keep making the same stuff over and over, or we wind up going out and I don't cook. But the good news is I'm starting to get back into my groove again.
This is sort of in answer to the question I hear all the time: "But, what do you eat?" Oh boy, what DON'T I eat nowadays? I mean, aside from meat and dairy? This is the kind of stuff I eat now!

I found this recipe on the Earth Balance website, but I modified it a tiny bit. I also made hummus, which we ate all of, and I forgot to take a picture, but I can give you the recipe for that real quick:

Spicy Hummus

• 1 15oz. can chickpeas, thoroughly rinsed and drained
• 3 cloves fresh garlic, coarsely chopped
• juice of one lemon
• 1-2 tsp. tahini
• 1 tsp. dried parsley
• 1/2 tsp. dill weed (dried dill)
• salt & pepper
• 1 tbsp. olive oil
• water, if needed

Put all ingredients in a blender or food processor and whirl until smooth. You may or may not need to add a tiny bit of water, depending on how thick/smooth you like it. I had to add about 2 teaspoons to thin it out to a spreadable consistency. It mostly depends on your beans- what brand, how dry they are, etc.

Sweet Potato Falafel

• 1lb. sweet potato, cooked and skins removed
• 1 15oz. can chickpeas, thoroughly rinsed and drained
• 4 cloves fresh garlic
• 1/4-1/2 cup bread crumbs
• 2 tbsp. ground flaxseed
• 2 tsp. dried parsley
• 1 tbsp. margarine (like Earth Balance)
• 1 tsp. cumin
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. pepper
• 1 tsp. coriander
• 1/2 tsp. turmeric
• 1/4 tsp. cinnamon

I started by boiling the sweet potato instead of roasting because I was short on time today, then drained them and allowed to cool slightly. Combine the chickpeas and potato with  margarine and garlic in a food processor, and whizz until smooth. Alternatively, you could just mash them with a potato masher and mince the garlic by hand,  but I wanted these to be really smooth and come together almost like a cookie dough. If whizzing in a blender or food processor, transfer to a bowl, and combine with all ingredients except bread crumbs. Depending on how you prepare your potatoes and their moisture content, you may or may not need to add bread crumbs. If you mashed everything by hand you probably won't need to add any, but I wound up adding 1/2 cup of bread crumbs. Next I used a cookie dough scoop(which is actually just a small ice cream scoop) to make my falafel balls, dropped them on a parchment lined cookie sheet, baked at 400F for 30 minutes, and they came out like this:

I whipped up a "salad" to throw on top of the hummus and flatbread and that consisted of romaine, cucumber, grape tomato, and red onion that I marinated in balsamic vinegar for about 15 minutes. In the end, this is how it all came together:

Typically I use pita for this, but all the pita I found was looking sad and stale at the store, so I grabbed these. It was great because these are whole grain with flax (!!) and all the pita I found was white.

Enjoy your night! Don't forget The Village Farmhouse is now on facebook! Click here to "like"!

Artisan Bread in 5

Today I would like to share with you something I have come to love, and also use on a weekly basis.

I love bread, I love fresh baked bread, and I've always loved making bread except for the fact that it can be very time consuming. 
Until now.
I know I'm a little behind on this trend, and you've all possibly heard about this by now. I had heard about the book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day a few years ago and just never bought it even though it intrigued me for obvious reasons.
Well, my friends, Zoe and Jeff did the best thing that cookbook authors can do, and that is share their basic master recipe FOR FREE, on youtube. This is brilliant because when they share the master recipe for free, people like me see it and get really excited about it and tell everyone on Earth about it, and other people who aren't so cheap go out and buy all their books.
So one day here I am browsing Pinterest and a suggested pin for the youtube videos they did comes up, and now I've been baking it (almost)once a week because it is so delicious and easy.

The original white recipe I tried first, and let me tell you it was nice and crusty on the outside, soft and light on the inside

This is probably the more favorable one because it's just like good crusty Italian bread, since it's a traditional boule.
I also made the whole wheat version which probably would have come out better if I didn't do them as rolls. Next time, I do plan to make the whole wheat but to bake it as loaves. 

I didn't get a picture of the finished product on Thanksgiving, but they came out pretty well. I think more room on the pan would have made them crustier, and less doughy on the inside- that was my error. They rose quite a lot and became more like hamburger buns as left overs so it was nice to have them around for sandwiches!
I haven't made any in the last couple weeks, actually contrary to what I wrote at the beginning of this post, but only because I've still got so much in the house between Christmas, and parties, and having family over, and just have not had the need for bread with meals because there's so much in the house. 
I plan to make a batch of the whole wheat maybe next week, I will post on how that comes out!
As for now, I highly recommend making the traditional white recipe! It takes practically no time, and it's soooo good!

It's A New Year!

Today I come to you with nothing but words.

I've decided, for a multitude of reasons, I do not want to participate in social media anymore. This means, specifically, facebook.
And I'd like to use this as an outlet to explain why I no longer wish to use this service anymore.

1. Because it is a complete waste of time.
This is first, because it is most obvious. I feel that over the years, I've gotten to a point where every time I have a spare moment I'm on my phone scrolling through my news feed, or on my computer staring at the same things, that I'm not even really reading, I'm just perusing over and over and over again. I decided to no longer have the app on my phone, to force myself to only use it on the computer, actively knowing I am wasting my time.

2. Because it makes high school last longer.
For a long time, I resisted the notion of discontinuing my facebook use, because I do have family on my personal page that are hard to keep in touch with otherwise. That still holds true, but honestly they're not popping up on my feed nearly as much as people that I used to see every day, 10 years ago. There are people I really and genuinely would love to keep in touch with that without facebook I would have lost all contact with, but there's also so many that we don't particularly want to talk to regularly, and vice versa. Doesn't that sound just like 20 minutes before homeroom? Having to deal with/listen to people simply because they are there and you feel you can't avoid it?

3. Because I don't want to be "keeping up with" you anymore.
This goes hand-in-hand with #2, but I mean something slightly different by this. I feel facebook creates, and breeds totally unnecessary drama. I will not say I am innocent of this. I find that in my ripe old age of 27, people are starting to settle down, have babies, buy homes, etc. That's all well and good(and I truly am happy for most of these people on my feed), but when it's shoved in my face in a "LOOKATME!!!" way, I'm sorry to say I'm not all that happy for you. I don't want to be told your life is perfect, much as I don't want to listen to people whine about how awful their life is. And that is all I ever see any more. We see it all the time, either there's a couple fighting with each other for all the world to see, or there's the couple who have nothing bad happening in their life and just COULD NOT be happier by any stretch of the imagination; you have the person who just got that great, awesome, incredible, new job and is just swimming in money(look at me now!), and the next post is the person who needs to tell everyone how crappy everything is, woe is me, feel bad for me. It's exhausting. I feel this breeds self-centered, attention-getting, and narcissistic behavior because everyone feels they have an audience. That may sound ironic coming from someone who created a blog to share their thoughts and experiments in everyday life, but I've really tried very hard in the last year to distance myself from the notion that people actually care about what I say, or my opinion.

4. POLITICS.
This one is further down on the list because we ALL do it. Everyone. We've all gotten sucked in and faltered on this one. Everyone has posted something concerning their political standing, especially when there's a looming election(myself included, I admit to being horribly annoying). But, why do we all do this? All it does is annoy everyone else because no one agrees. We're turning ourselves into rage-balls because politics is so hot-button and no one ever agrees anymore. We all know everyone on our list is going to get aggravated and it's like we love knowing how ticked people will get, or how true it is...but where does it get you? What is the point? It's like being able to have your own press conference, I guess, and as I write this I realize a lot of what I wrote in #3 carries over to here.

5. Because I just don't need it.
I feel I have gotten so sucked in, and so dependent on facebook, that I've forgotten how useless it really is, and that it's not something I need to follow all the time. And when it comes down to it, I really just don't need it. I don't need to be reading all this stuff, wasting my time instead of being productive and actively trying to keep relationships I care about instead of scrolling through a bunch I probably wouldn't have otherwise. Furthermore, I just don't want it anymore.

I will admit I created a page specifically to post my blog stuff, so I'm not quitting entirely, but I won't be following my personal page anymore, and these are the reasons why. I feel that by only having a page for this blog, I will not be on there unless I have a purpose.