Za’atar crusted vegetables and feta

Date night. Parents are visiting. Transforming a formerly-boring Tuesday into a luxurious treat-yourself-Tuesday. We’ve made this Za’atar Crusted Vegetables and Feta recipe for all of it. With loads of charred and caramelized veggies, this recipe is nourishing, flexible, and satisfying. A few wholesome ingredients plus olive oil, za’atar, and most importantly, time in the oven, transforms into a decadent and complex meal. Plus, it makes so many servings, which is great for a crowd, or for leftovers if you don’t want to share – we aren’t judging! 

We adore making this recipe alongside hummus and baba ganoush, and serving with toasted pita bread. Seriously – the crispy roasted feta, especially dipped in a scoop of hummus is to die for. We lovingly refer to this combo as “Mediterranean night”. Most recently, Mediterranean night made an appearance alongside our plans to hang out and cook together, open a bottle of red, and hate-watch the Twilight franchise (It is delightfully so much worse than we remembered). 

The most prep you need to do for this recipe is chopping your vegetables. After that, simply spread out your veggies on a pan, toss with oil, za’atar, and salt, and top with feta and lemons. Into the oven it goes for about 40 minutes. If you do want to serve it with hummus, you can opt for store-bought, or make our quick hummus recipe while your veggies bake. Otherwise, you can eat the veggies and feta with bites of pita, on their own, over greens or a grain, or stuff them inside your pita bread, perhaps with some greek yogurt or tahini as a sauce. 

Here’s what makes this a stellar recipe. 

• Roasted garlic: A whole bulb? Yes. Trust. Any sharp garlic taste mellows out when it’s roasted for a while. Your whole garlic cloves will soften, sweeten, and mellow out into a yummy complex flavor.
• Roasted feta: the slabs of feta cooking in the oven somehow get a little melty and also crispy. 
• Carmelized dates: When the dates cook, they become this wonderful carmelized, nutty and complex treat. 
• Crispy broccoli and cauliflower
• Roasted red peppers and onions
• Lemon slices: Lemon cooking on top of the veggies to infuse all of their citrus-y goodness. 
• Za’atar: to top it all off, a generous amount of za’atar seasoning. This is a savory and earthy spice used in Middle Eastern cooking. Don’t be shy with how much you use. It is a very mild seasoning that enhances a lot of flavor but doesn’t get overpowering. We get ours in big bags from our local Indian grocer, but it can be sold at other ethnic groceries, groceries with a well-stocked international section, health food grocers, or online.