Alright let’s start making the turkey burgers. Now we’re going to make a sort of a turkey burger with Middle Eastern spices, they call them Khafta; a Khafta is a spicy meat, well in this case it’s got turkey in it, and I think it’s actually a good way to go especially with turkey meat because, you know, turkey is soon the healthier style burger because it has less fat there obviously, but it could use a little bit of flavor.
The first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to make the yogurt sauce; I like to use a really good thick, wheat yogurt. And we’re going to add a little bit of cayenne pepper, and a little bit of cinnamon, some salt and pepper, and then some apples. Now I like to use a tartar apple like a granny smith, I think that it works really well; I’m just going to cut it by hand. And the one thing that this is going to add is a really nice contrast and texture to get the nice, smooth creaminess of yogurt and we’re going to get some nice crispy, crunchy texture in here by adding the apples, and of course, you know it’s sweet and it’s tart flavor. And that’s good, just like that. And then we’re going to throw our apples right into the yogurt, add a touch of honey just to kind of extend the natural sweetness to the apples. Mix this around, give this a taste, little bit of heat from the cayenne, you got that nice sweetness from the apples and the cinnamon and the honey, well it’s got a nice and kicking the (0:01:39.6) we need that. I’m just going to add a little bit of parsley, let the yogurt sauce refrigerate and then we can move on to the making the actual turkey mixture. So we’re going to start with some onions and some garlic. What you can do is actually grate the onions kind of like almost pulverizing them. So we’re going to take our red onions and we’ll take our chopped garlic, you know, rubbed garlic obviously a little bit goes a long way so be careful there. Then we’re going to take our dried spices, now we’re going to take our cayenne and our cinnamon that we used in the yogurt, some cinnamon, and then we have some cumin and then we have some all-spice. Then we’ll take a little bit of tomato paste, and then we’re going to add a little bit of canola oil, mix this together; okay now, I’d like to taste this, and this should have a really intense flavor. I could taste the spices, I could taste the heat from the cayenne, I could taste the onions and the garlic, I could taste all the things that we put in there. And now what we’re going to do, it’s because its so intense, don’t forget we have to add it to the turkey, I’m going to take some chopped parsley, salt and pepper, little more canola; now remember I’m adding just a little bit of oil cause I’m just a little worried about the moisture in the turkey burgers cause there’s almost no fat in there and I, you know we don’t want dry burgers, I mean no matter what. One thing about it is I will not give up flavor and moisture for health. Alright, now we can mix this all together. Alright so we’re going to let this rest for about an hour in the refrigerator, I just want all the flavors to become friends and really sort of melt together. Let’s first make this mini-turkey burgers, we’re going to make small burgers, okay? And, which really makes sense, in the sense that classically, these are usually made into base of the turkey meatballs. Then we just brush this with a little oil, canola, we season with a little salt and pepper, I’m going to wash my hands; alright that’s really grilled and the sun is out. Okay for these, same principle; nice hot grill, we’re going to get a really nice sear on this, remember, this is poultry so we’re going to cook them all the way through. And because they’re smaller they’re going to cook faster too. And we will get the oil, I’ll be right back.
For the other side, this smell good, you can smell the spices soon as they head the grill. Alright so I’m going to cover this up and let them cook, okay. So, let’s quickly make our dressing, if you can find it, I like California flat leaf spinach, it’s silkier. So we’re going to take some lemon, just a little bit of lemon juice and some olive oil; very, very simple, salt and pepper, just to kind of coat very gently our spinach. We have the spinach, we have our pita, I would just cut in half and we’re going to be able to stuff our grilled turkey burgers in there, with some of the yogurt, some of the spinach, we have to wait for our turkey to grill, and then will be time to eat our turkey burger, Pita salad. Okay, check on our mini turkey burgers, to get our Middle Eastern turkey burgers that we’re going to stuff into our Pita bread with the yogurt sauce and little spinach salad. And now the turkey burger party begins, alright we got our little, we got some pita here, and what I like to do with the pita is get the ones that have the pockets in it, you know so you can open them up, and just cut them in half, alright, let’s put in a couple of turkey burgers, I think two of this size is going to work perfectly and then some of our yogurt and green apple sauce and then some spinach. Maybe like a paper-thin slice of the onion, give it some good crunch. You know what else is really great about the yogurt and the dressing is that if the turkey gets a little dry, if you lose some of its moisture, the yogurt and the lemon dressing that’s on the spinach, you kind of put the moisture back into the sandwich or the burger. And boy this is one of the flavor, wow.