Stuffed Tomatoes

This was a slight repurposing of the stuff tomato recipe from Saveur Cooks Authentic American. These are little individual tomato salads stuffed with arborio rice and black beans.

The recipe recommends arborio as it stays creamy at cold temperatures. The recipe also specified Lima beans as do a few recipes in this book. It sort of feels like they based the book on about 6 stories from the early days of the magazine. (Not that that's a bad thing, I love the Saveur cookbooks!)

The recipe specified arugula but I had herb salad greens so I used those. They used lemons, I used limes. If I had gone all the way and used cilantro instead of parsley we would be eating southwest style mini tomato salads.

Stuffed Tomatoes

6 large beefsteak type tomatoes or in my case 8 romas
1 can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 cup cooked arborio rice
1 handful mixed greens, chopped
1/4 cup chopped chives
1/4 cup chopped parsley
1 tablespoon olive oil
the juice of 2 key limes
salt & pepper

Plunge the tomatos into a big pot of boiling water and remove after 30 seconds.

This next instruction is cute, "slip off the skins". I have peeled enough tomatoes this way to know that I will have better luck if I make an X at the bottom of the tomato with a paring knife, which I did. Also, even with the short blanching time, my tomatoes were so small (thin walled) they pretty much cooked which left them not exactly salad cups. Next time round I will simply pare the raw tomatoes and sacrifice the little bit of flesh I would lose.

Cut off the top 1/4 of the tomatoes and reserve. Scoop out the seeds and core of the tomatoes and reserve. Salt the tomatoes well and set upside down to drain their exuded juices.

Chop up the reserved tomato flesh.

Mix together the reserved tomato flesh, beans, rice, greens, parsley and chives. Drizzle with oil and lime juice. Season to your taste with salt and pepper.

Set tomatoes cut side up. (This was impossible for my soggy tomatoes so I stuffed them and leaned them against the sides of the Le Creuset 3-1/2-Quart French Oven I was serving them in. (There are definitely less expensive ways to serve a salad.)

Et Voila! Little mini tomato salads.

Shrimp13