Olive stuffed tomatoes and parsley and red onion salad

Olive stuffed tomatoes and red onion and parsley salad

Due to insane busyness at work, I have a number of things mentally queued up to post about.  This was actually what we had a a starter for our Christmas Day meal which tells you something about how long my mental queue is!

Cherry tomatoes being hollowed out

Because we were having a relatively heavy main - spanokopita - I wanted something light for the starter but, at the same time, something special.  For some reason, things always feel more special when they're stuffed.  I suppose it's because you know that someone spent ages with their thumb in a series of tomatoes to produce it. Even if that someone is you.  The main lesson that I took from this is that, if you do not want your thumb to be completely numb at the end of this, you should make sure the tomatoes are room temperature before you begin. 

Anyway, that life lesson aside, this was pretty good.  I got some cherry tomatoes - well, baby plum tomatoes, I think but it amounts to the same thing - hollowed them out with my thumb, stuffed them with olives (I had to chop the olives to get them inside but obviously this depends on the relative sizes of your olives and your tomatoes), and served on a bed of chopped red onion and herbs. 

Red onion and parsley salad

Olive stuffed tomatoes and red onion and parsley salad

cheese-baked egg-stuffed tomatoes - Sally Butcher recipe

Baked tomatoes with eggs and cheese

For no particular reason, I've been making a few things lately that involve baking eggs inside things.  I love eggs and baked eggs are a great way to have eggs for dinner, rather than the usual breakfast.  I also rather enjoy the thrill of fitting the eggs inside whatever it is.

I have Sally Butcher's Veggiestan out of the library at the moment and one of the recipes that I instantly wanted to try was this one for tomatoes stuffed with eggs and topped with cheese.  Cunningly, it involves putting some bread underneath to sop up the juices and make more substantial.

These were pretty easy - just scooping out the inside of tomatoes, frying some onions, mixing some of the inside of the tomato with the onions, cracking an egg inside each and topping with cheese but look a lot more impressive.  I did think that they might go better with brunch than dinner, though.

Hollowed out tomatoes

Hollowed tomatoes with eggs inside

Stuffed tomatoes with eggs and cheese

Baked tomatoes with eggs and cheese

Tomatoes stuffed with blue cheese

Stuffed tomato!

So, a while ago, I experimented with stuffing leeks with blue cheese, with the stuffing mixture adapted from Ottolenghi's fantastic stuffed onions.  I thought the leeks were a little tough but I really liked the stuffing mixture, so I decided that I'd use it again, this time for stuffing tomatoes.

I scooped out the insides of nine tomatoes and left them upside down on some kitchen towel while I dealt with the filling, get them as dry inside as reasonably possible.

Hollowed out tomato

Hollowed out tomatoes

The stuffing was slightly different this time to the time with the leeks, because of having slightly different ingredients on hand but was broadly similar:  two slices of bread's worth of breadcrumbs, 6 finely chopped spring onions, three cloves of garlic finely minced, 300g of Danish blue, a handful of chopped parsley, a teaspoon of mustard, a glug of olive oil and salt and black pepper.

Stuffing

Tomatoes ready for stuffing

Tomatoes ready for stuffing

I then stuffed the tomatoes and baked for 20 minutes at 200 degrees C.

Cooked stuffed tomatoes

Verdict:  very nice, though probably more of a starter than a main course (unless you serve with something else - we had garlic bread with them).  If you want the tomatoes to be more roasted, it's probably worth baking them for longer (which probably requires putting the tops back on them so that the stuffing doesn't get burnt or baking them for five minutes or so before stuffing them.) We quite liked them at the level of roasted they were, though.

Cooked stuffed tomatoes