More Whole Grains and a try at Falafel

Two new recipes came out of the kitchen yesterday.

First, another recipe from King Arthur's Whole Grain Baking, Maple-Walnut Bread. This bread calls for maple flavor, something I have not been successful in finding locally, so I had to order it from King Arthur. It would be silly to order a tiny 1-ounce bottle of flavoring and pay for the shipping, but I also needed their pre-cut parchment sheets and some mini-diced crystallized ginger. Side note: Their parchment sheets are great. They cost $18.50, but since I also use Silpats, these sheets last a long time in my house - I'd estimate that my first bunch lasted me over a year, but then again, I'm doing a lot more baking these days, so I'm not sure how long they'll last these days. Still, these are one convenience item that I think are worth every penny.

Maple Walnut Bread

But on to the bread. This bread has a subtle maple flavor that is pleasant, but not overly sweet. I would definitely recommend adding nuts for a nice textural interest - the walnuts are perfect with the maple flavoring, but pecans would be nice here too. I would also recommend using the maple flavor if at all possible - the flavor that comes through is fairly subtle and I think that leaving it out would result in fairly bland bread. The only change I made to the recipe was to use raw turbinado sugar - just another effort to step away from using refined ingredients. This kind of sugar is still too expensive for me to justify using on a regular basis, but I'd like to try to use it here and there and in this case, it seemed to work quite nicely.

Edited to add: I weighed my flour for this recipe and found that even though I was using King Arthur Whole Wheat Flour, the volume measurement was still almost a full 1/4 cup more than when I measured it by weight. Had I used the volume measurement, the bread most likely would have been too dry. This bread is just moist enough - could possibly a little more moist for my liking. I also cut back the walnuts to 1 cup and there seemed to be enough for my liking.

The next dish we tried is something I used to make way back in the days when I wasn't eating meat, but have not tried for a very long time. Originally I wanted to try the falafel recipe from the January issue of Cooking Light, but after reading the reviews, I decided that there were probably better recipes out there. I really wanted to try the recipe that Joe posted a while back, but I didn't have any dried garbanzo beans, so I decided on a different recipe, also from Cooking Light.

Falafel with Cucumber-Yogurt Dressing

This recipe was just okay. I felt the falafel were fairly lacking in flavor - I've definitely had better. I used the arugula and the cucumber sauce from the January 2007 recipe. The cucumber sauce was pretty good, but I'd really like to try it with a tahini-based sauce. So, next time it will be the falafel recipe that Joe posted, along with this tahini sauce from Cooking Light. One good thing - the boys seemed pretty receptive to falafel, so I'm hoping this can become something on our regular rotation once we find a recipe we really like.