A smelly Valentine's Day Feast

This Valentine's Day, I cooked a special middle-eastern dinner for the "Sous-Chef" and I.
I got swept away in the excitement of cooking new foods and following new recipes to create a menu inspired by one of my favourite restaurants Nuba that I didn't seem to notice that pretty much every dish was loaded with onion and garlic. Of course, I also put quite a bit of spice in the food too because, well.... I gotta be me!
As a result, we ended up with a pretty delicious dinner that had us reeking of onions and garlic and a little bit sweaty from the high spice level. Pretty romantic!

The menu was based around the idea of making my own falafel.

I worked off a pretty basic falafel recipe from one of my favourite recipe blogs Budget Bytes.

Pretty basic stuff. Chickpeas, fresh herbs, garlic, red onion...thicken with baking powder and flour. I've pretty much given up on my magic bullet for food processing needs and started using an electric hand-mixer/blender. I whipped up the dough around lunch time, let it sit in the fridge for the afternoon and it was ready for pan-frying in the evening.

I also made pita toasts with chili/olive oil/sea salt, lemon and garlic crispy oven roasted cauliflower, and tabouleh (which has mint in it but doesn't even begin to cancel out all of the onion going on).

**The sous-chef gets credit for the heart shaped napkins......what a romantic! For dessert....we had a lot of mints and gum!!!!