Superfast Kofte

So to go with our delicious sweet corn and bean salad, we concocted Superfast Kofte from Cooking Light's March 2007 issue. Kofte are a Turkish meatball made using a variety of tasty spices.


When pulling all the spices for this recipe, we realized we were out of cumin (sad face!). So instead, we substituted a pre-prepared mix of garam masala, an Indian spice blend that includes cumin, allspice, and cinnamon, all of which are also used in this recipe. I suppose we could've easily omitted them and just used the garam masala alone, but as we've observed before the Cooking Light recipes often are less flavorful than we prefer, so we went ahead and followed all of the other directions.


When forming our meatballs, we made them exactly that: balls. In retrospect, we should've made patties to make them easier to eat inside the pita. As it was, we just cut them in half and put the two halves in.


We also experienced some "breakage" of the meatballs as they baked. My suspicion is that we should've chopped the onions just a touch more finely; you can see from the image at right that we did a course chop, and I think that was a major contributing factor.


The other thing I learned while making this dish is that I don't particularly care for Greek-style yogurt. Who knew? If we make these again (and we may, but I wouldn't say it's a definite), I might instead put some extra veggies like spinach and radishes in the pita along with the tomato, to give it a little crunch.

So here, at left, is what we ended up with. It was a tasty little treat, and easy to bring to work the next day (minus the yogurt, that is). The corn and summer vegetable saute is definitely going in our repertoire, but the kofte wasn't impressive enough to earn a spot on the roster. If it's lucky, it might still get to be on our practice squad.