Koftas in Tomato Sauce

Koftas, in short, are meatballs originating from the Middle East or South Asia (click on the link for the Wiki article :) ). They're usually made up of beef or lamb, apparently, but this is a chicken household, so of course, ours are made of chicken!

What you need:
For the koftas:
675g boneless skinless chicken, minced or chopped into fine pieces
1 onion, grated
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 teaspoon dried parsley
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1 egg, beaten
seasoned flour, for coating (I used plain flour with salt and black pepper)
4 tablespoons olive oil

For the tomato sauce:
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon plain flour
1 cup chicken stock
425g can chopped tomatoes, with their juice
1 teaspoon caster sugar
1/4 teaspoon dried mixed herbs

Salt and black pepper, for seasoning
Parsley, for garnishing
Cooked pasta and Parmesan cheese, to serve

What to do:

1. Preheat the oven to 180 C.
2. Put the chicken into a bowl together with the onion, garlic, parsley, spices, seasoning and beaten egg. Mix together thoroughly and shape into 24 x 4cm balls. Roll lightly in seasoned flour to coat.
3. Heat the oil in a frying pan and brown the balls in small batches. Remove and drain on kitchen paper.
4. To make the tomato sauce, melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add the flour, then blend in the stock and tomatoes along with their juice. Add the sugar and herbs. Bring to the boil, cover and simmer for 10-15 minutes.
5. Place the chicken balls in a shallow ovenproof dish and pour over the sauce. Cover and bake for 30-40 minutes.
6. Serve the koftas and sauce, garnished with parsley and accompanied by pasta plus grated Parmesan cheese.
   

The first comment the other two had for this was,"Wow, it smells different!" Gee, I wonder why that is? Perhaps because I didn't use any oyster sauce, soy sauce or hoisin sauce??? I was getting quite tired of Hadi and Justin's stir-fried dinners, so I decided to take advantage of the weekend, and spend some time on a relatively fussy dish.

And fussy it was! I was worried that the koftas wouldn't form properly, since I didn't happen to have minced chicken with me and trying to use a blender yielded tuna chicken. So I had to chop them up with a pair of kicthen scissors instead. It turned out well though :) The chicken pieces stuck quite well to each other, and frying them in the oil made them less likely to fall apart. It was a very very messy job though, and gave copious amounts of washing-up to do. I felt absurdly guilty at this, and washed most of them. Sigh.

When I first came across this, I thought it was an Italian dish (because of the pasta :P) but I realise that kofta doesn't actually sound Italian, hehe. What a surprise to read that it is actually from somewhere else! But since we haven't had pasta in awhile, I thought it'd be a nice recipe to try :)

Hadi and Justin really liked it, hehe. Some select quotes are: "This is a very good dinner!" "Looks good!" "This can almost be served in a restaurant. Now all you need is that guy to grind black pepper over your food." Hoho. *Ihsan's head gets bigger by the minute*

One tiny problem though. I didn't have any cumin or coriander, so I substituted with Chinese five-spice powder instead, which has cinnamon, fennel, star anise, cloves and ginger. They taste nothing alike, but that was the only spice I had to work with in our cupboard. :P When the koftas were hot, it wasn't a big problem. It was quite tasty, in fact. (This was when the compliments poured in, hoho) But once the dish cooled down, it became really clear that Chinese five-spice, in fact, does not go that well with tomato sauce. :P Cumin and coriander would give it a quite different taste. Cumin smells of curry, that I know, hehe. They sound like they would go better with these. They're used more often in South Asian cooking anyway, and koftas come from around that area, so.... yeah, I might try this again, but with the correct spices this time ;)

In spite of that though, the dish still tasted very good! I'm quite impressed with my self! :D

Quote of the day: Red meat is not bad for you. Now blue-green meat, that's bad for you!

On a side-note, I'm getting quite a good response with my Blogger blog :) So those of you who are still reading my blog on Friendster, why don't you have a looksee, see if you like it any better? ;)