Salads with Jazz Hands
Tailoring Great Ideas to Suit . . . Me
MY HEAD ALMOST EXPLODED recently when I caught a glimpse chef Edward Lee’s Hummus As a Salad, in which he deconstructs the dip we all know so intimately that it hardly registers any more. I’m all for any dish—or story, or painting, or song—that turns our idea of something upside down in order to make us appreciate it all over again.
And then I saw a dish that sort of does the same for falafel, by Hetty McKinnon. Both take a star of a dish, break it down, spin it around, and send it back onstage—but this time with jazz hands.
I’m definitely going to make both of the original recipes. But when I thought about which to try first, I found I wanted both of them—and I wanted immediate gratification. So I decided to take elements that I found most exciting from each and turn them into a third salad for us.
I want to say right now that I’m thrilled with the nice, big composed salad it turned into. It would make a perfect lunch by itself and a great dinner, too, with nothing but a roast chicken. (My favorite, simplest, most delicious way to roast a chicken is this one from Michael Ruhlman.)
Using flavors and textures and techniques from the work of others is nothing new in the recipe biz. If what you end up with isn’t substantially different from the original, you want to give the creators credit. Sometimes, it’s nice to do so even if your own recipe was simply inspired by another. But don’t show up with a dish and tell everyone: I invented this layered cheese, sauce, and sheet pasta. Because everyone knows Mr. Lasagna did that.
In this case, I’m basically recombining entire parts of two dishes to make a kind of benevolent Frankenstein’s monster.
I loved that both recipes flavored the chickpeas with cumin. But they both also cooked the chickpeas in a lot of oil, and as delicious as it sounded: I’ve already fried chickpeas once this week, and that’s my limit.
So instead, I chopped half of them roughly and returned them to the bowl with their brothers and sisters, dressed them lightly with olive oil, lemon, and cumin, and let them marinate overnight.
For richness, I went for the big pile of crumbled feta Lee uses on top of his garlic-fried chickpeas. Of course I kept the tahini dressing both salads use. Is there anything better than tahini?
And since all of this brought to mind Moishe’s, my favorite falafel stand in Manhattan—a lot of people’s favorite, actually—I wanted some of the classic flavors and textures from their perfect pita sandwich. So: tahini sauce, hot sauce, and pickles. The hot sauce they offer at Moishe’s is a red one, but I used this falafel/hummus moment to finally make a schug; I’ll have plenty of uses for the leftovers, since it’s good on everything.