Sesame-feta meatballs with burst tomatoes
Wobbly cheese and tomato gushers
If you’re looking for inherently streamlined recipes every week, welcome. Forty ingredients is all you need to eat well.
Today’s sheet-pan meal is soft and smushy to eat but bites with salt and savoriness. It’s one of my favorite recipes in recent memory.
The meatballs have a delicate crunch from sesame seeds and warm with cumin and shallot, but more than anything, they’re excitingly juicy and well-seasoned because they’re plumped with feta brine instead of water. I made them with ground lamb and beef, but a fattier ground turkey would also work.
The meatballs roast alongside cherry tomatoes — even wintertime ones will gush tangy-sweet juices after some time in a hot oven. And then there’s the hot cheese: pockets of wobbly, creamy feta that smack with salt.
Leaks are often considered bad and inconvenient. A leaky pipe, roof, window. Ugh, a gas leak. But this sheet-pan meal is all the better because of the pan drippings made from leaky tomatoes, weepy cubes of feta, and brawny liquid cooking out of the meatballs.
You can slide everything, including the pan juices, into a pita or eat it all over grains, sautéed greens, or white beans. But I liked it on its own, spooned out of a bowl. Smush.
