In my first year of married life, I lovingly made a pan of these for dinner. I used my mother-in-law's very labor intensive recipe and devoted the 45 minutes the tomatoes were in the oven to deep cleaning my kitchen. As I went to remove the pan from the oven, my oven mitt slipped and I dropped the Pyrex dish in which the tomatoes had cooked. As you can imagine, it shattered upon impact and the cooked tomatoes exploded onto what felt like every surface of the newly clean kitchen. Glass shards, stuffing and tomato splatter was everywhere.
It took a solid decade before I made these again. At the time I lived in France so, when cravings struck, I would order them at my local gourmet deli but, now that I am back in the States, I make them myself from time to time. I don't use my former mother-in-law's recipe because experience has shown that it wasn't all that good (the addition of egg yolk and bread crumbs made for tough stuffing among other things), and I never use a glass dish when making these.
4 large beef steak tomatoes
1/2 lb ground beef
1/2 lb ground pork
1/2 small white onion, finely diced
1/2 cup Parmesan
1 tsp Herbes de Provence or dried thyme, if you prefer
1 cup long grain rice
1 1/2 cups water
Salt
Preheat the oven to 350.
Rinse the rice well and mix it with the water in a bowl. Set aside.
Gently mix the ground meats, the Parmesan, the finely chopped onion, the Herbes de Provence and a liberal amount of salt in a bowl.
Cut the tops of the tomatoes and, using the bowl of a spoon, remove all of the flesh from the inside, without making a hole in the tomato. Do this over the bowl containing the meat and allow all the seeds and juice to fall into the meat mixture. Finely chop the flesh and add it to the bowl containing the rice.
Spread the rice mixture along the bottom of an oven safe dish.
Fill each tomato with 1/4 of the meat mixture. I find that the best way to do this is to gingerly make 4 large meatballs, without pressing the meat together compactly as this will make the stuffing tough, and gently pressing the lower half into the tomato. You want a dome of stuffing to protrude from the tomato. Cover each stuffed tomato with its matching jaunty top piece and place on top of the rice.
Bake for 45 minutes. I like to check at the 20 minute mark and fluff up the rice with a fork to ensure even cooking.
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