Cold stuffed tomatoes with cheese
This is a kind of Moebius cheese and tomato sandwich. The tomato is on the outside and the bread and cheese is inside. There are two ways of stuffing the tomatoes. The easiest is to cut them in half and scoop out the centres. This is good if you are going to put them on a plate and serve them at the table. They look nice garnished with a few fresh parsley or basil leaves. If, however, you want to take them on a picnic, and this is highly recommended, you might find stuffing whole tomatoes gives a more robust and less messy product. To do this, cut out the green stalky bits with a knife and scoop out the centres with a teaspoon. If you like this recipe you might like cold stuffed tomatoes with mushrooms.
Ingredients
5-7 medium tomatoes
1 green pepper
150g of grated cheese
2 mugs of breadcrumbs
2 tablespoons of margarine
A few sprigs of fresh basil
2 cloves of garlic
3 or 4 of the cores from the tomatoes (minus seeds)
Salt
Finely chop the green pepper, garlic and basil. Give everything
a quick pound in a pestle and mortar to soften it up and release the flavours.
Mix everything together well except the tomato cores. Keep these until last
so you can control the consistency. The stuffing should form a dryish, stiff
paste. Mix in some chopped tomato core and the paste should soften. Add a little
more if you think it's still to dry. Pack the stuffing into the hollowed-out
tomatoes.