Your children loved...

... .....Black Bean Felafels... .....

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Ingredients:

2 cups black beans, drained and rinsed
500 g ground beef
1 t chili powder
1 t oregano
2 cloves garlic
1 egg
3 t lime juice

(In my recipes, 't' = teaspoon, and 'T' = tablespoon.)

Method:
Preheat oven to 425F.
Mash beans till smooth but chunky. (Don't ask me: this is what the recipe says. What it means is you'll see a greyish paste, but there will be lots of black bits in it.)
Add the rest of the ingredients and mix with your hands, then form into about 24 balls, 3 cm across.
Place on foil-lined sheet and bake 15 minutes.

Now, the full recipe calls for frying some vegetables (onions, peppers), chopping some fresh (avocado, tomato), and putting it all together in a half-pita with a cream sauce made of yoghurt and cilantro.

Which all sounds very yummy, but also sounded way beyond the coordination capacities of your average two- or three-year-old! I just gave them to the kids straight up, along with some niblet corn and cooked carrot sticks.

With ketchup for dipping, of course.