 This video is sponsored by our 30 day diet and habit change program, 1K30. Go to 1K30.com to learn more. Oh, that's so good. I forget how good mental soup is. It's like one of those soups that you're like, no, mental soup, it's so good and flavorful. That is delicious. Hi guys, it's Shavo with Life is No Yoke and today we are making three Middle Eastern recipes that we grew up eating that are delicious, nutritious and happen to be plant based, but you won't notice, which is part of what's awesome about Middle Eastern food. So we're starting off with the like classic, classic, classic, we're making falafel. Falafel is probably my favorite food. I'm gonna say it's my favorite food. It's so, so delicious and it's one of those things that it's like easier to make than you think. It takes a food processor. I'm using the Vitamix food processor attachment today. You'll notice I'm using quite a few Vitamix products in our recipes today. This isn't like a product placement thing. This is just what we do for work. We are affiliates for the Vitamix program. So if you're in the market for a food processor attachment, I'll show you how it works. It's really, really cool. Neither Lenny or I grew up having food processors in our house, food processors in our houses. So we kind of had to like learn how to use one and what it's good for and it had to earn its keep because it's not small. So it had to like prove to us that it belonged in our house and it does and one of the reasons it does is because of homemade falafel. So the only prep work that this takes is you have to soak dry chickpeas the night before. So we bought a bag of dried chickpeas. They're available almost everywhere now. If you're having a hard time finding them, they're often in the like Mexican food section. Sometimes they say chickpeas, sometimes they say garbanzo beans on the bag. So I soaked them overnight. They've about doubled in size and all I'm gonna do is dump the water out and give them a quick rinse. So you'll notice that they're way less slimy than a can of chickpeas. And I think that's kind of the consistency that we're looking for here. We are gonna use canned chickpeas for our third recipe today in Homest. That's how we make our homest. We always have a can of chickpeas in the pantry and so, oh, how many am I gonna lose? All right, so to make homest, you need chickpeas. That's the main ingredient, falafel. Lenny's mouthing falafel, not homest. We're making falafel first. So you need chickpeas. Wait a sec, to make homest, you need the same ingredients for the record. Chickpeas and spices. Anyway, we're making falafel. Chickpeas and onion, parsley, any kind of flour you want. So this is a really easy recipe to make gluten-free. You can use chickpea flour, oat flour, almond flour. You just need a tiny bit of flour as a binder and then a bunch of spices. If the spices are what is like a hurdle for you in making this, skip some of them. Like the main ones really are, it's cumin. Cumin and garlic is like, if you have that in your pantry, still make it. All the other ones are a bonus that will make it taste better. Okay, we're making falafel. We've got a pound of chickpeas. It was a pound when it was dry. I wonder what it weighs now. More probably, because it sucked in some of that liquid. A pound of chickpeas, tablespoon and a half of any flour that you want. I should mention that we're using Tori Avery's recipe. She has some great recipes on her site and we've made this falafel recipe from her before and it's super good, so we're making it again. And we'll link the recipe below so that if you want to make this exact one you can. We are using baking powder. That is to make them a little fluffier. That's an optional ingredient according to the recipe, so you don't have to do that one if you don't want to. And then I'm chopping up a small onion. I don't have to do a perfect chop job here because they're going into the food processor. But for falafel you really want a good consistent homogenous texture. So I am gonna give it a rough chop so that it has a good chance. All right, parsley is the next one. I actually, there's two kinds of parsley. There's curly parsley which is what this is and then there's Italian parsley. And I literally in the grocery store aisle yesterday when I was grocery shopping was like Middle Eastern food curly parsley, Middle Eastern food Italian parsley. And I should have known it's curly parsley. That's what my gut was telling me but I wanted to make sure. So it is fresh parsley. The recipe only calls for fresh parsley so I needed to Google it. So it calls for a fourth of a cup. I'm gonna eyeball it. That's more than a fourth of a cup. That's about a fourth of a cup, right? My eyes are watering from the onion. So that's cute. Oh my God. Maybe don't chop a raw onion when you're doing a video. How do you get around that though? Everything that delicious has a raw onion in it. All right, three to five cloves of garlic. The recipe calls for it and she says she prefers roasted garlic but I do not have time for that today. So we're using minced garlic. You can obviously use roasted garlic. You can use garlic cloves, whatever. The flavor of garlic needs to be in there. So that was four cloves of garlic. One and three fourths teaspoon of salt. But you know what? That's kind of the main flavor. So I gotta be salty. Any fried food has to be salty I think. Where's my fourth? You'll fast forward me doing this obviously, right? No one wants to watch me put salt in a blender. Are you sure? Yeah, especially because I don't have the right. You're so pretty though. I don't care. Okay, salt. My eyes are bleeding. Okay. Do you want to take a break? No, no breaks. The kids are at daycare for like two hours. Let's do this. Okay, cumin, two teaspoons. So like I said, cumin is the one that you don't want to skip. If you have barely any ingredients and you're still wanting to make falafel, don't skip the cumin. It smells like a street, Jerusalem street food. Okay. Cumin, one teaspoon coriander. Coriander, did you know, is just dried cilantro? I think I made that up. Oh my God, I hope I didn't make that up and then said that to everyone. It smells so good. Coriander smells like fresh, I don't know, smells like falafel to be honest. Okay, coriander in fourth of a teaspoon black pepper. I don't ever measure pepper. I just, here you go. Crackety cracks. Ground pepper. All right, cayenne fourth of a teaspoon. I've probably had this cayenne pepper for like four years. Oh, don't smell that one, it's pepper. All right, pinch of ground cardamom. Cardamom smells so yummy. I want like a candle that smells like cardamom. This one, totally skippable. I'm sorry, Tori Avery. This is an expensive spice and if you don't want to go buy it because you're making falafel once, don't go buy it. But if you make it all the time, go buy it. She says a pinch, but I'm going to go with like a man pinch. Not a baby finger pinch. Okay. Man pinch, why? I don't think so. Okay, just so we all are clear what I'm doing here. I know this setup looks like a little bit different for anyone that doesn't have a Vitamix at home. So this is a Vitamix A3500. That is part of the Ascent series. Any of the Ascent series will fit the food processor attachment on top. This is the food processor attachment. It's like a blender container and it sits right on top of the blender itself. And then it recognizes because it's like a smart system, it recognizes that it's a food processor and not a container that I'm about to make smoothies with basically. So all I'm going to do is turn this on and wait until it's like a fine paste. So I don't want it to be chunky and I don't want it to like turn into hummus basically. I need it somewhere in between. I need it to be able to like form balls. So in the recipe it says look for couscous consistency which because we're Middle Eastern, we know what that is but not everyone knows what couscous is. So it's tiny, tiny, tiny little balls. Good question. It doesn't say on here because she's not using a Vitamix, but what would you do? It's a trick question. Food processor. Oh, trick question, rude. I just want to look and see. I don't think it's done yet, but I want to look inside. Cool. It's actually close. All right. I am going to blend our food process a little more because I think that's too big of a consistency and just a reminder that the food processor only has one speed. So I can't like ramp it up to 10 and go faster. It's just. So I'm waiting for it to kind of cave in on itself because you can see at the bottom it's starting to become. Yeah. So at the bottom it's mixing more than at the top. So I'm actually going to do take this out and stir it around and then put that back in. Is that blade sharp? This blade is sharp. I'm used to blades not being sharp on a Vitamix but this one is. So we don't let the kids play with this one. Okay. We are going to pulse it just a little bit longer to get the right consistency. There it goes. So that's kind of the consistency that we're looking for. Looks good. Okay. I grabbed a bowl. We fixed my mic. We are putting this in the fridge because falafel is better when it's cooled. Even if you're making falafel like out of a box which I do sometimes, you still have to cool it for like 15 minutes to a half hour in the fridge. It has to like sit. And I don't know why. The science of falafel but it does have to cool. So this one you let sit in the fridge for an hour to two hours depending on how much time you have. This is the consistency we're looking for. You can clump it together. It's kind of like that magic sand. What's that stuff called? Kinetic sand. Kinetic sand if you have or have had young kids in the last 10, 15 years. And then I'm gonna mix it up with a fork. Basically make sure that there aren't any chunks in there which it looks like there aren't at all. So that's good. And to make sure that there's no like dry flowery bits in there at all, which I don't see any. So that's good too. And it smells already like falafel. Like if you ate this plain, I think it wouldn't be bad. But obviously we're gonna be looking for that like delicious fried dark brown exterior and like a yummy cooked through but soft interior. Okay, so I'm covering it and throwing it in the fridge for an hour. And then we'll come back and we'll fry it. So in it goes. All right, I'm gonna clean up this recipe and then we're gonna move on to the next one. And the next one we're making is one of our recipes and it's one that's like, in our meal plan we make it a handful of times, not a year I would say. We make it like every few months. And it's our lentil soup and it's absolutely delicious, super flavorful and I think easier than falafel. It's more of a like one step thing. And in this one, we are featuring the immersion blender the Vitamix immersion blender but any old immersion blender will do on this one or even just a regular Vitamix or blender container because we're looking for varied textures. So I'm gonna clean up the kitchen and we'll come back and make lentil soup. The kids are off, but the dog is not. Okay, so we're back to make lentil soup. This is a hefty, it's like heavy. It's like a real machine. So this is the Vitamix immersion blender. They finally came out with one a couple of years ago and we're gonna use that in the soup but you do not need one of these to make the soup. You can use any blender. You're just looking for a varied consistency. We are gonna use this because we have it and it's cool and we wanna show you and it's easy because I can just stick it into the pot itself instead of like ladling soup into a blender. So it's just the easiest way to do it. So this soup, I am going to chop a bunch of veggies and throw them on to saute down and then I'm gonna put all the other ingredients in to the pot and use the immersion blender. So it's technically a one pot plus immersion blender recipe which isn't bad. So we're gonna do, we're looking for the same kind of flavors as the falafel with this lentil soup. Lentil soup is one of those things that Lenny orders every time we go to a Middle Eastern restaurant. He's like, where's the lentil soup at? So we had to kind of make our own because a lot of times actually lentil soup is sneaky and uses chicken broth. So we're using veggie broth in this one just to make sure that it is plant-based and delicious but you can use chicken broth and it is also delicious that way. Okay, so the recipe calls for like a half a cup of each of these. I'm not gonna measure it because it doesn't actually matter. You just want all these flavors in. So tomatoes, celery, carrots, those are gonna form the, I probably don't need to cut the tomato yet because I'm not gonna saute that. I should start with the onion but I'm gonna finish this as I already started. Okay, so for, get out of my way, gigantic. Okay, it's actually not gigantic. It's much smaller than the actual Vitamix. In fact, I sold one of these to a friend that lives in Manhattan because she has just like the tiniest New York apartment. She's always wanted a Vitamix but just doesn't have like the footprint for it in her apartment. And so she got one of these so she can keep it in a drawer and she makes her smoothies. She puts them in a mason jar, shoves this thing in and makes a smoothie in the morning. I think that's pretty cool. Okay, onion. I think I'm just gonna do a half an onion in this case and the chopping matter is a little bit more here because only half the mixture is gonna get blended up and the other half stays. So I am gonna use oil in my pan to saute but if you're a whole food plant, face person just skip the oil. You already know that. You know how to saute with just water. All right, carrots. Also calls for a half of a cup. Use your heart. Our kids actually like this soup and so I am going to put extra carrots in because that's their favorite part. They kind of like pick the carrots out but there's so many lentils stuck to the carrot so it's all good, right? Do you remember when we first got our oldest to eat the soup and he was like not really wanting to and so we fed him just the carrots that came out of the soup and then we also put sweet potatoes in and fed him those because they looked like the carrots and he like didn't really know the difference and then we just fed him the soup and he eventually like ate like a full adult serving of the soup but we had to like slowly ramp him up. Great trick. I grew up eating lentil soup and this is like a taste like a bowl of mac and cheese. Like it's like a home, what's that called? Comfort food. Comfort food. It's like a comfort food. Lentil soup. And. What's so great about lentils? I was just going to tell you, Lenny. Just going to tell you, Lenny lentils. The great thing about lentils but really the great thing about lentils is they are like packed full of protein. They're like a sneaky protein punch. So if you are trying to eat less meat or if you're like trying to find healthy ways to get more protein into your diet, I know protein is kind of like a fad right now. We've always needed protein but if you're considering your protein intake, lentils are a really, really good and quick and really inexpensive way to get protein in. So if you're struggling to afford some of the groceries that you lentils, if you're struggling to afford some of the groceries that you're used to getting, I know like meat and eggs and stuff, the prices are up. Lentils so inexpensive and pack a great nutritional punch. So those are always a good option if you are on a budget. All right, so the onions are going into the pan. You want to follow me for the sizzle? Come on over, MTB crib style sizzle. Oh, I wanted a bigger sizzle than that. All right, what a disappointing sizzle. I'm gonna throw the celery in and then we'll chop up the carrot. So I think like I said, I'm not like a classically shaped trained chef by any means, but does feel like every soup we make starts with celery, onions and carrots, no? Like that's like the basis of a soup. Sounds right. Yeah, so we're sticking with that. All right, so I'm gonna finish chopping these up and then we're gonna cook these down, saute them for about eight minutes until the onions are translucent and then we'll check back in for the next ingredients. All right, I'm gonna add the rest of the ingredients to the soup now that those have had a chance to saute down. So tomatoes, let's see what they look like. Just a little brown. Adding tomatoes in. I'm adding half a pound, so like eight ounces of rinsed chickpeas or lentils. Lentils need to be rinsed just like rice does. You could use any kind of lentils here. Brown, green, red, these are brown. They're all very good for you. They all would do fine in the soup. Run on out of salt. All right, if you're low sodium, just skip the extra salt, buy low sodium broth. You do not have to use that much sodium. We are using a quart, right? Is this a quart? I don't wanna do math. I think it's a quart. Four cups. And you could buy low sodium on this too, if you want, obviously. Or you could make your own vegetable broth, which someday we'll probably do, but not today. Not today. Why? Because we have four kids. Four kids, three kids, five and under and a dog. And that's enough for me. Don't need to make my own broth. Okay, one teaspoon of cumin. Cumin, again, is one of the main flavors. You're gonna notice in all three of these recipes we're using cumin. That is just like the flavor of the Middle East cumin. One teaspoon. Extra steps in our kitchen. Time, fourth of a teaspoon. We have time on hand because we like making our wild rice soup. And this is like one of the main ingredients. So we always have dried thyme and we always have bay leaves in the house because of that. But if you don't have time, skip it. Not a necessary ingredient. All right, time. I'm looking at my computer. That's why I'm not looking into the camera. Time, cardamom, fourth. Again, skip it if you don't have it. But it is a very elevated flavor. Like, it tastes like a fancier chef when you use things like cardamom. Like for sure. Gives you the upper edge on impressing people that you're feeding. And we're gonna use curry in this one too, which I don't know if that's like a traditional usage of it, but we like the way that it tastes in lentil soup. So we're gonna use a fourth of a teaspoon. It also just makes the color less ugly and brown. All right, we added all the things. Now we're gonna bring it to a boil, cover and cook for like 40 minutes. Lentils are notoriously hard to cook for a long time because, or they're notoriously hard to get soft. So they need to cook for a long time. So I am gonna wait until it boils and then put the lid on and reduce it for about 30, 40 minutes and then check them. You do not want like hard little stones in there that would be gross. And then once it's all cooked up, that's when I'm gonna add in the, or that's when I'm gonna process them with the immersion blender. So we're gonna let that boil. Kind of looks like beef stew right now. So come back when it's boiling and we'll put the lid on. We're gonna get set up for the next, actually before we do that. So we're making falafel. It's not quite ready to take out of the fridge yet. And we're making, and we're making peek-a-boo. And so we're making falafel. It's not ready to go yet. And we're making lentil soup. If you're having a meal like this, and honestly, I don't know that I necessarily would serve falafel with lentil soup. We're just showing you three recipes that you can use. I wouldn't necessarily meal plan these together. When Lenny goes out to a Mediterranean, or a Middle Eastern restaurant, he orders a falafel sandwich and lentil soup, which is why we're making it. But I have some time right now while these things are processing. So I'm gonna make a Jerusalem salad, which really is just cucumber, tomato and onion. And then it goes on the side of all three of these things, basically. So we're gonna quickly throw that together. So the trick with Jerusalem salad is just to chop small. It's gonna be more delicious the smaller it is. I distinctly remember my mom, who is not Middle Eastern, having to impress my dad's family. And she felt like the best way to impress them would be to chop as small as she possibly could in her Jerusalem salad. Like that was an important thing for her to prove that she was a worthy wife, which is hysterical now. Okay, we are, we're gonna make kind of a small Jerusalem salad just to serve on the side. We're gonna make like pita falafel sandwiches. You can have falafel without having it in a pita sandwich. A lot of people eat it just like on a platter, like a falafel platter on rice or with hummus. But we like having falafel sandwiches. So this is one of those things that you put inside the falafel sandwich. Inside the pita pocket is a Jerusalem salad. I cannot eat falafel without a Jerusalem salad. It's like part of the process. The other thing that I love putting in my falafel is like these pickles that they're like these canned pickles that you can only get at specialty grocery stores if you live in the United States. I don't think we have any right now, but I wish we did, because those are my favorite. And there's a lot of like sauces and stuff that you could do on this. A lot of store-bought sauces, but also just like a simple tahini sauce that you can put on. Trader Joe's sells a sauce called Srub. It starts with a Z. It's like Z-H-O-U-G and that is a really good flavor packed sauce that has this flavor profile in it that's spicy that is really yummy on falafel pita sandwiches. All right, so just chopping up the cucumber. So cucumber and tomato really are the main ingredients in a Jerusalem salad. I like onion in mine. I don't know that it's a necessity, like if everyone does it that way, but that's how I like it. And then I squeeze on some lemon and salt and pepper and some olive oil and that's it. I'm sure there's like lots of different ways to do a classic Jerusalem salad, but that is how I do it. And I was born in Jerusalem, so you have to just listen to me. It comes on my passport, this recipe. Okay, I kid, I kid. So we've got small chopped. Gonna throw some onion in, not a ton. Just enough. Do not learn knife skills from this YouTube channel. But I'm sure someone has a great YouTube tutorial on how to chop correctly. That is not me. Get a good knife though. My life has been like changed from having like a good chef's knife. Can we link this knife? Is that a thing we can do? Yeah. All right, we'll link this knife out for you because it's like clutch. We gift this knife to people for like big life things like weddings and stuff. I don't think we can afford to gift people Vitamixes. It's a, that's a nice gift. Okay, maybe for close friends and family. We have gifted them to close friends and family, but they get the reconditioned ones. Oh, that's another story. Okay. They're like new. They are like new. And no one would, we tell them they're reconditioned. Sometimes they are. Okay. Lemon. I'm going to get this gangly one because it needs to go. Our soup is boiling. You want to come over here and check it out. All right. We'll just unchild lock all the cabinets so that we can get a top. It's funny, but it's like not funny. Okay. So it's boiling. You can already see that the lentils are starting to like puff up a little bit, which is good. So I'm just going to throw the top on, turn the heat down, and I'm going to set a 30 minute timer and then I'll check them after 30 minutes. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Hey, you guys watch me press this button 30 times. All right. So all I'm doing to flavor this is tiny bit of olive oil. Oh, heavy hand. This gangly lemon. Don't be afraid to use your gangl stuff. Like that's perfectly fine inside, right? I learned this trick. You do it in your hand so that you can collect the seeds. Like, see that? All three of the seeds are in my hand, but the juice goes through. So smart. All right, lemony. And then salt and pepper. And that is it for Jerusalem salad. You could get fancy and add like parsley and stuff too if you wanted, but it's not how we roll around here. And my guess is that some people put garlic in here too. I don't because our tahini sauce has a lot of garlic in it. So I don't need to like be overloaded, but that's gonna go on the side of our falafel. And it took like three minutes to make. As long as you have the ingredients on hand, you should definitely make a Jerusalem salad for the side. So Lenny just asked if we could make a Jerusalem salad in the Vitamix and the answer is like, kind of. We do make our detox salad, which is carrots, kale, cauliflower, and purple cabbage in the Vitamix. And it's like rough chopped kind of into small chunks. You could do that. I wouldn't recommend it, honestly. I don't think tomatoes and cucumbers have the right consistency to break down. The reason that the detox salad works so well like that is because of what those ingredients are like heavier and more like coarse. So I think it's easier to not smash them up. I don't know how you would not get pico de gallo with cucumber in it, basically, if you used a Vitamix. All right, so we finished making our Jerusalem salad. We're gonna move on to making just a basic, classic hummus in the Vitamix container. So like pointing with my big knife. So come back for hummus in just a second. We are moving on to hummus. We're gonna use the small container because we're only gonna make like one can's worth of chickpeas. If you wanted to use the traditional 64 ounce container, you would need to use more chickpeas, two or three cans I would say, to make sure that the blades grab it all down and make it creamy. So hummus is one of those things that there's like a million different ways that you can make it in consistencies and whatever. Basically what you're looking for is tahini, garlic, lemon, chickpea, blended up in a smooth consistency. You can make it like ultra pillowy soft, amazingly smooth restaurant style by soaking your chickpeas overnight. I already did that for the falafel so like I didn't need to do it for this one too. You could use a can of chickpeas and cook them down to remove some of the skins and make them even softer. I'm also not gonna do that because we're making lentil soup. This is how I would actually make it which is dumping a can of chickpeas into my blender. It's gonna get pretty dang smooth. Could it get smoother? Sure, do I care? Not really, would you? Probably not. Are you a chef? Why are you on this YouTube channel, right? Okay, so we're using one can of chickpeas here, also known as garbanzos. I am gonna take the liquid of this out and I was just gonna pour it down the sink but I can't because the liquid in a can of chickpeas is like magical. It's called aquafaba bean water basically and we use it in our morning pancakes because we run kind of a plant-based house. We don't put eggs in our pancakes so I have a jar that I keep in the fridge that I just pour chickpea water into and then I use it in what, he just made a gross face, like he's not the one that makes us use aquafaba in our pancakes, weirdo. I know it sounds like kind of weird and maybe not something that you have thought to do before but you see how it's kind of the consistency of egg whites? That's why it's perfect and it actually can whip up to like a meringue like egg whites can, like you can make actual stiff peaks of egg whites so we'll use this in our pancakes now. What else can you make with aquafaba? Maneys, like people make like mayonnaise out of it? Basically anything you can make egg whites out of you can make with aquafaba which I think is pretty cool. All right, so as I mentioned there's like a lot of different smoothnesses for hummus. You could definitely make this in a food processor and you'd probably get a very good texture. We already use the food processor so I wanna show you something in the blender. You also could do this and pop off the skins on each one of these. That would make your hummus smoother. If you have a high powered blender like a Vitamix like yeah, you're putting skins in but like it's gonna crush them down so I'm just not that concerned. If you have a crappy blender that your grandma passed down to you in your college apartment like you might wanna take a minute to do this but it's not a minute. That would take you like eight minutes. So if you've got the time and a crappy blender feel free. I don't today. Okay, so we've got one can of chickpeas in there. Save the water. And then tahini is the next ingredient. Tahina, tahini, however you wanna pronounce it. It is ground up sesame. So it's similar consistency to like a natural peanut butter if this is an ingredient you haven't used before. You wanna stir it up just like you would a natural peanut butter like it separates with its natural oils and it gets kind of thick on the bottom. So you wanna make sure to stir it up. This is a really, really delicious ingredient on its own. Like you could just drizzle this itself on veggies or something but it is one of the main flavors that you're gonna taste in hummus even if you didn't know it was in there. Most people know chickpeas are in hummus but not everyone knows that tahina is. So we're gonna use quite a bit of this. We're using three-fourths of a cup. Almost as much as we are the chickpeas. So it's almost a whole can of this. Kind of crazy. That feels like too much but I guess we'll see. Can you make your own tahini? I've never done it but I'm sure that you can. You just have to buy sesame seeds in bulk and grind them up like you would make homemade peanut butter. All right, so the tahina is going in tahini, tahina. I don't wanna waste any. All right. We got three-fourths of a cup. Now lemon is the next main, we said chickpeas, tahini, lemon, garlic. Those are the four main ingredients in a hummus. There's tons of different kinds of hummus that you can make and on our website we've got a Thai curry one and a black olive one and a sun-dried tomato one and all these fancy ones. This is like the base of a hummus. This is like if you're gonna start a hummus, you do this and then you add those things. Unless you're making like a chocolate hummus or like a snickerdoodle hummus or something, then you would skip the garlic and lemon, right? Our kids like chocolate hummus. I still don't know how I feel about chocolate hummus. But if you're into it, you're into it. All right, six tablespoons of squeezed lemon juice. That's like a lot. My hands are gonna be very squeezy after this. Why would I squeeze directly into my face like that? Come on. How many lemons is six tablespoons, do you think? Like three lemons worth? Use up my gangly one first. I'm gonna get the seeds out if I can. Oh, yeah, let's do that, right? Okay, so let's not waste this one. So that's one. And then maybe like a half of a lemon. Peeled, okay. Get yourself a cute lemon saver. It tells your husband there's a half a lemon in here. Don't open a new one, right? All right, yeah, good call. Since we're using a high-powered blender, we can very easily just felt wrong to be juicing something. This feels wrong. Better for your tooth. The pith nutrients. So I am gonna take the skin off. The Vitamix obviously can like handle the skin and in some recipes, we do leave the peel, I'm saying skin, but I mean peel. We leave the peel on because we want that super strong lemon flavor. In this case, I don't think we do. And again, it can break down the seeds, but like if I can see them, I'll take them out. And we can always make it more lemony if it doesn't taste lemony enough, but we can't like un-lemon it once we lemon it. So all right, three cloves of garlic. Again, I'm going with easy minced garlic. That's two, that's three. Teaspoon of cumin. Remember cumin is kind of the ingredient that goes in all three of these. Cumin is what smells like the streets, the street food in the Middle East. One teaspoon of cumin. Keep looking at the recipe. Kosher salt and pepper to taste. So this is personal preference. And they do a hearty crack of each. And I think that's it. And then the kind of trick to making really, really smooth home. Well, there's two tricks. If you're gonna be using a Vitamix or a blender, you want a blender with a tamper like the Vitamix comes with because you wanna be able to push the ingredients down into the blade from the corners. Hummus is like a notoriously thick blend. So you'll see when I'm doing it that I'm gonna be pushing from the corners down so that everything hits the blade. So that's trick number one to get a homogenous like very smooth consistency. The other trick is to add ice water. You may have seen this on the side of my table here. We're gonna add ice water as it's blending to get an even smoother texture. That's kind of like one of those tricks that will make it even smoother without all the hoopla of like boiling and soaking and all of that, okay? So I'm gonna blend. I'm gonna slowly ramp from level one up to 10. The blender does best on its highest level. So that's 10. You can see I'm pushing, it makes it working. But for a second so that I can pour water in without it spilling everywhere. Ice water, it's not easy to pour. So right now it's like mostly processed but it could definitely use a little bit more. So next time I make this I would get a cup that has like a pour spout but my sous chef didn't know that. I'm gonna add more for you too. Back to work. All right, so you can tell why this hamper is like so important in this. Like I'm working hard to get the ingredients into the blade and that's gonna help me like make that consistent smooth texture. So this turned out really, really well. You could make it smoother but I think this is pretty legit. What do you think? Yeah, looks good to me. It's smooth, it broke it all down. I know the blender sounded kind of scary but that's just it doing its job and it working hard. And remember, your Vitamix comes with like a pretty good warranty. So if you do mess it up they can always help fix it for you. But homemade should not be one of those things that your blender can't handle but it does sound like it is struggling to do it but it can do it. Should I taste it? Should I taste it? Yes, nodding, yes. Yum. It's very tahini-y but in a good way. But I think I want more garlic. We're used to like, we buy garlic hummus so I wanted to like taste garlic here and a little lemony here. So I'm gonna put another half a lemon in I think and another teaspoon of garlic. And then I think it'll be perfect. So one whole lemon basically. One whole lemon. I'm gonna crack a little more. I like stuff very flavorful. I think this is a excellent like start especially if you haven't like had that much hummus before but I don't know. I like everything like packed. Packed with flavor. I'm gonna go more. Add a little bit more water. Really hard to pour out of that. Okay, this will be to make like while your kids are napping. It's definitely loud but that's okay. You can trust us. We're Mr. and Mrs. Vitamix. You can trust that your blender can do this. It can do it. That is beautifully smooth hummus and my guess is it's gonna taste even better than it did before. Like that's what you would expect to see at a Middle Eastern restaurant. Thick, smooth, consistent. Yum. Way more flavor in that like that. So extra of everything basically. Really delicious. Yum. Really good. I'm really happy with that. So again, you could like add a bunch of different stuff to this to like make it more exciting. You could do an olive hummus, a sun-dried tomato hummus, whatever. It is a jalapeno. I mean, you walk down the grocery aisle and there's like 30 different kinds of hummus. The point is chickpeas, garlic, tahini, lemon makes the base for any good hummus. So we've got falafel that are almost ready to fry. We've got a soup that we need to check on in two minutes and we've got our homemade hummus and our homemade Jerusalem salad ready. So we're like pretty close to having a full Middle Eastern meal here. So hang tight, we'll come back to show you how to immersion blend the soup and we'll fry up the falafel. All right, we'll come check on our lentil soup. It's been on low heat for 30 minutes and then I turned the heat off and let it steam for like another 10 just cause that's what needed to happen today not cause that's in the recipe. All right, let's check the consistency of the lentils. We're looking for a tiny bit of chew, but nice. I know they're ready because it just broke apart in my hand. Those are perfect. So you don't want them to be like smashed completely but you want them to be, to like hold their shape but be soft. So now I'm moving, come over here please. I'm moving all the big chunks of veggies over to this side. I don't really want it to blend up any of the like carrots or celery or anything. And I'm gonna throw the immersion blender in to make some range of consistency in here. So we talked about any immersion blender we'll do, any blender we'll do. You just want some of the lentils blended up. I'm gonna turn it up. Okay, here we go. One just flew out. All right, so right now that looks kind of weird but when you mix back in, now you've got that kind of classic lentil soup consistency. See how it looks like it's a creamy base now? It's not, it's just blended up lentils. So you could keep going if you wanted. You could blend a little more. I think I might just a little bit more. Right? Like we said, not the most beautiful soup. I don't even want to describe what it looks like to me but it is so delicious and you can smell all those like delicious Middle Eastern flavors in there. You can smell the cumin. You can smell the onion. And there you go. Homemade lentil soup. You could always go smoother. In fact, you could blend down this whole thing if you wanted to. I like some consistency in mine. And so I'm gonna keep it like this because I think the kids will like the carrots. If I was serving this to just Lonnie I might keep blending but because it's going to the kids. I'm gonna keep some carrots in there. There we have it, lentil soup. All right, so the next thing we're gonna do is fry up our falafel and then we'll serve you a full feast. Be right back. It's gonna be like pipe and hot but yes, let's try it. You just want to try it. Oh, that's so good. I forget how good lentil soup is. It's like one of those soups that you're like, well, lentil soup, it's so good and flavorful. That is delicious. It doesn't need anything on it either. You know how sometimes you eat soup and you're like, okay, but it needs sour cream or it needs crunchy or it needs, this is like all it needs. It's a full thing on its own. That is delicious. And I don't know why we don't make it more because it's not that hard to make. Really inexpensive packed full of protein lentil soup. Come back for falafel. Getting the falafel out of the fridge. Remember we had to cool it for one to two hours. Looks exactly the same. Like you shouldn't see a change. It's just something in the chemical makeup of it needed to do that. Okay, so you can form your falafel balls. You want like two tablespoons basically of falafel dough. I just eyeball it and I make sure that my hands are wet either with water or with oil. And your oil, you can use any oil that has a high smoke point. So sunflower, avocado, canola oil, whatever it is. And you want to roll your ball like that. So it's like tight but not like firm and it should stay all together. And if it doesn't stay together then you got to troubleshoot the batter a little bit. But this is what it should look like. And I'm just going to test one to see if my oil is hot enough. So the oil should be about 360 to 375 degrees. It should bubble when it goes in and it should take like one to two minutes on each side to brown. So each falafel should take four or five minutes to make. So it looks like it's pretty good. I am going to turn it up just a hint. I don't have all day. But that is what it should look like in there. So I'll make a couple of rounds of falafel with you guys on camera here and then we'll serve you up this meal. And hopefully you will be inspired to make some of these delicious Middle Eastern dishes using your blender. So my method for this is going to be to use a slotted spoon and then I'm going to put each ball when it's fried up on a paper towel. We don't really use very many paper towels in the house but when you are frying falafels kind of need something to soak up the oil. I guess you could use like a tea towel if you wanted to as well. We're going to use paper towels today. All right, so I can tell that that middle one is already getting brown on the bottom. So it's time to flip it. That is perfect. That's exactly what you want it to look like. You know there's a problem with your batter if you start to see like a bunch of the falafel pieces falling off. You don't want that. You want it to stick together like that. So see how when I flip it, like barely anything comes off. That's what you want. You can use two spoons if you want. Okay, so you want them brown all the way around. I've got about an inch and a half of oil in here. You could go higher if you wanted. So that middle one is really the color that we're going for. That is perfect falafel color. If your oil is too hot, they're going to cook on the outside, they're still going to be raw on the inside. So it's kind of a science that you need to be watching them at all times. Just like a deep fryer. Like the more you put in there, the temperature of the oil goes down. So I like to do four or five at a time and then make another batch as opposed to like throwing. I know I could probably fit 10 or 12 in there but they would take longer to fry like that. So I'm going to get some paper towels ready. So the paper towels are just to suck up that extra oil. That is their purpose here. So another trick is to keep everything as close as you can to your pan so that you don't get oil like everywhere in your kitchen. You just keep everything right by you. All right, so let's check on that middle one. So the oil could probably be higher in my pan. You see how around the middle it's not quite cooked all the way around? So I'm going to cheat and turn it on its side for now but I'll add more oil for the next round so that it's higher, so that the middles get cooked at the same level. A lot of troubleshooting when you are first making something like this. Just always do kind of a practice batch. Don't reach your hand into hot oil. It's not a good idea. So I'm cheating and turning these on their sides. The next batch we won't have to do that for. Fry my babies. 12, 15. Just want one perfect falafel for the picture. Just put it at the top. So these are taking a little bit longer to do just cause I'm having to fry the sides but otherwise it would be, they would be done by now. All right, falafel, glistening. These look great. And I think they're gonna be super flavorful and pack a good punch. I'm gonna throw a little more oil in for the next round here, which means it'll take another minute to heat itself up. Forgot to say, falafel is one of those things that you absolutely could bake. You do not have to fry falafel. Fried falafel is the classic traditional way that's how you would be served it. In any country in the Middle East, they're gonna fry up a falafel. But if you're like on a health journey and you're wanting to make some healthy recipes for yourself, you can absolutely bake a falafel. They just turn out like a little more dry. They still have a crispy exterior and like a more squishy interior. They're just a little more dry. They're not like the falafel that you're used to having at a food stand. So just keep that in mind when you're making them that they're not gonna turn out exactly like this. You're not gonna get this perfectly brown. That is deep fried. And that's what makes it so delicious. Same thing with the air fryer, I think. I think you could get a pretty good, the air fryer would probably give you somewhere in between. We've made falafel only once in the air fryer and I know that because they didn't turn out as good as they turn out on a pan with oil. So we did it once, we said we did it. They were good, they were edible, they were dinner that night, but like I haven't tried to make them again in the air fryer because they're so much better in oil. But you absolutely can make falafel in the air fryer or in the oven and it'll be delicious. It'll just be a little less delicious. So I'm just waiting for my oil to heat back up because I added some more in. And then we'll do one more round. But I think this batter makes like 36 falafels or something. Trying not to say balls on camera. Are you noticing another blender full of ingredients? I have to go pick up the kids at their daycare so I make them a protein shake for the car. So now's a good time to blend it, right? Black seeds, can you hear? Black seeds, frozen banana, oats, chocolate powder. That worked perfectly. Did I have it on nine? That's their after-school snack. They get like all excited to have protein shakes in the car. And the only sweetener in there is the protein powder. So that's kinda cool. All right, ready? There we go. That's the sound we want. So it's kind of like making sand castles. Like they're not gonna stick together unless you push. Like you have to use a little bit of pressure to get them to stick together. But then the frying itself makes a little jacket for each one so they stick together and stay together. These look great, don't they? Yeah, they look great. I feel like you should throw it through the air fryer just to show the difference. Nah. No one's got time for that today. Maybe later. After we pick up the kids and bring them to their doctor's appointments and come home for naps and have snacks, you guys get it. If you have kids, you get it. Okay, this one is already browning, which is telling me I should turn my oil down. It's kind of like a, there's no way to like tell you exactly what to do. You just kind of have to watch it. And the more you make them, the better you get at eyeballing it. That makes sense. Those look great. Frying them up. All right, we'll get the pitas ready. You can eat bread if you're healthy. But- Oh, I was talking about the puffer falafel. Oh. Yeah, falafels are healthy. And a healthy lifestyle is about having balance, right? It's about having balance. All right, so I'm pulling the next balls out and throwing them out on the tray. You can keep going and make all of them. We're going to stop so that we can show you guys how to put them together and so that I can pick up the kids on time. So, pita, so the falafels themselves are done. You can eat them like that. Like we said, you can like eat them on rice. You can eat them on a salad, whatever you want. We're making pita sandwiches because that is how we like to eat them, but also because they're pretty for you guys watching on YouTube. Whole. Flip it. Okay, so normally when we do this for dinner, and we actually do make falafel for dinner quite a bit, I would also have like a purple cabbage. I think it's technically called red cabbage, which is weird because it's purple. Like a slaw made out of purple cabbage, just because I like that on mine. But we're not going to do that today because we are highlighting the falafel themselves. So, now you pick the best ones. Usually I get better pita too. This is kind of a hurt pita, but that's okay. Okay, and technically that's all you need. But we're going to put some Jerusalem salad on there. Usually if I was making this for dinner and I was like serving it, I do a thin layer of hummus on the inside, and then I would shove some vegetables, some Jerusalem salad at the bottom, and then I would put the falafel in, and then I would do more Jerusalem salad on top, some slaw and the pickles if I had some, and then I would put tahini dressing all over the top. Because we're like showcasing this on like a visual thing, I'm not going to do any of that because it'll just look soggy, but that is how I would serve it if we were eating it for dinner. Do you want me to put Jerusalem salad on it? Okay, we did it. We made three Middle Eastern dishes using like all the different Vitamix products we possibly could possibly could in the time that our kids were at daycare this morning. So I'm pretty impressed. We made falafel using the food processor attachment. We made hummus using the small container, and we made a lentil soup using the immersion blender. All three of these are plant-based, packed full protein, nutritious, filling, and one of the, like they're all things that you don't miss meat or dairy products in. Like you don't notice that those things are missing. These are all things that you can make for dinner. Would not recommend making all three in one afternoon. Not ideal, but you can easily make a falafel dinner and please almost everyone at the table. You could make this lentil soup for lunch or dinner, and please almost everyone at the table, and hummus is one of those things that you should just have in your fridge all the time. So if you don't feel like buying it at the store, you can make it, it's amazing. If you guys like videos like this and you've stuck around this long watching me blather on about Middle Eastern delicious food, hit the thumbs up and subscribe because we're gonna try to make more videos like this where you're just with me in the kitchen. And if you have any ideas on what we should make next, write it in the comments below and maybe we will do it. Thanks for watching you guys. Have a good day. Why am I so awkward at the end? You made it through all of this and now I'm just so weird. All right, tying my shoes and going to get the kids. I forgot to try the falafel. So Lenny wants me to try the falafel on camera, but I did just eat one of the falafels off camera and it's absolutely delicious, like not at all how good I was expecting it to be. I was like, oh homemade falafel, yum. This is like legit very yum. So I will show you that on camera so that you can witness me biting into it and agreeing with myself that it's delicious. It's delicious. It's got the crispy outside, the cooked through but soft inside and the flavor is spot on on these. I know I said you could skip some of the spices, but if you're like really wanting to make this like perfect, don't skim it out of the license. Falafels, I'm going to doll this one up. I'm going to add pickles, slaw, hummus and tahini sauce and then that's an edible falafel sandwich and a perfect one. Cheers.