Sesame Soy Meatballs with Housin Sauce

Happy Sunday!  Aside from the deluge of water and risk of flooding we're facing around here, this weekend has been pretty good for us. We've taken time to relax, see family and enjoy cheering on the Memphis Grizzlies in the NBA playoffs. I've also done some cooking, photo-snapping and I'm now catching up on blogging!

A few weeks ago, we made these Sesame Soy Meatballs from Cooking Light.

(first time)

They were easy to make and full of great ingredients. They tasted good, but we decided they were missing something big - a sauce! So, this past week, we gave them another shot and adapted the recipe. This time, we LOVED them. Here's the recipe with my comments:

(second time)

Sesame Soy Meatballs with Housin Sauce

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Ingredients:

1/3 cup minced green onions

2 Tbsp brown sugar

3 Tbsp low sodium soy sauce

2 Tbsp dark sesame oil

1 Tbsp chile paste (such as Sambal Oelek, found in Asian food aisle)

1/4 tsp salt

6 garlic cloves, minced

1 lb ground sirloin

Cooking spray

Sauce:

1/2 cup chicken broth

1 Tbsp cornstarch

1 Tbsp  low sodium soy sauce

1 Tbsp Housin sauce

1 Tbsp Chinese rice wine or sherry

• Preheat oven to 400
• Combine first 7 ingredients in a large bowl. Add beef, mix gently to combine. With moist hands, shape beef mixture into 20 meatballs.

If you wanted to do some work ahead of time, you could stop here and cover the meatballs with plastic wrap, refrigerate and make within 24 hours.

• Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add half of the meatballs to the pan and rotate frequently to brown all sides (about 4 minutes total).
• Arrange browned meatballs on a jelly roll pan coated with cooking spray. 
• Bake meatballs for 7 minutes or until done.

I like browning them first to bring out extra flavor and make the outside a bit crispier, but you don't have to do that step. You could just bake them longer.

• To make the sauce, whisk sauce ingredients together in a saucepan and heat over low heat. Bring to a slight simmer and let cool, it should thicken pretty easily.

We served our meatballs with edamame and jasmine rice. I tossed the jasmine rice in some chopped cilantro and a bit more chile paste. Yum!

This is so easy to do and I promise you'll love them!