Difficulty Level: Easy

I love a Middle Eastern food spread with chewy homemade pita bread and lots of salads with palate cleansing ingredients like lemon and parsley. The cuisine makes for a terrific buffet because it relies heavily on vegetables and legumes so you can make lots of healthy salads and dips such as hummus and baba ghanoush and tabouli for very little money. Most of the recipes are easy to make and take very little time to put together so you can easily ten or twelve dishes on the table for guests to sample.

The one thing I've always struggled with is the falafel. I tried and tried to make those delectable little chickpea fritters, but they always fell apart when I fried them. One more than one occasion I ended up with a pan that looked more like chickpea and oil soup than anything you could put into a pita. I did finally make a successful batch of falafel after discovering that you really must make them from dried chickpeas, rather than canned. The canned have too much moisture in them, so when they hit the oil the whole thing pretty much explodes.They were really delicious, but they are still a bit finicky and they are, of course, fried in oil.

I was quite intrigued when I came across this recipe using sunflower seeds rather than chickpeas and baking rather than frying. These were extremely easy and took a fraction of the time to make traditional falafels. They have an interesting texture because they are crunchy on the outside and softer on the inside and they were really tasty. My husband thought they wouldn't work in pita because they would break apart, but I think, who cares once it's inside the pita? You could put them in a salad with tomatoes and sprouts, or you could serve them as appetizers with a spicy dip.They don't replace the traditional falafel for me, but they were a really nice twist on a classic food.

INGREDIENTS