I arrived at home yesterday –finally fortunately fffffFriday– at 5 PM, with an idée fixe in my head and a linen bag full of groceries hanging on my shoulder. The dilemma: writing a paper on E.A. Poe's 'unity of effect' in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ or cooking stuffed summer tomatoes. Well, while cooking, I thought, I can arrange what I internalised the past days reading 'The Philosophy of Composition', right? A recipe needs its proper unity of impression. This one is easy to prepare, it needn’t a lot of intellectual processes, and allows one to be a little absent minded, thinking about, let’s say, the personal obsession of my beloved Poe that links red/blood/death and runs through the tale because of her beloved Virginia.
I'll explain step by step this recipe for those who don't nourish their bodies as finely and thickly as their souls. Eat well, eat Mediterranean, and your brains will work better.
For eight tomatoes we will need eight! tomatoes. The variety I chose is what in Spain is called 'tomate bola': round and beautifully ripe tomatoes with still a feeling of hardness in the tips of your fingers when you touch them. Besides, a medium-large onion, 300 g of grind meat, 50 g of grated Grana Padano cheese, 5 generous tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, salt, oregano, fresh parsley, and freshly ground pepper.
First we cut with the point of a knife the upper part of each tomato, less that one inch, as showed below.
Now it comes the fine motor skill part of the thing: with the help of a coffee spoon –don't try to do it with a tea spoon!– we have to hollow out the tomatoes taking out all its juice and all the tomato flesh that we can remove leaving the tomato as a whole entity.
The juice and pieces of tomato flesh are to be reserved in a bowl.
Then we grind up the tomato juice with the help of a mixer.
In a skillet with one tablespoon of olive oil we fry the grind meat over a medium-high heat till it's done slightly golden.
We reserve the meat in a bowl, chop the onion finely, and in the same skillet, without washing it, using the meat juices that remains in it, we add 2 olive oil tablespoons and sauté the onion over a medium-high heat, stirring it and watching over until it gets golden brown.
When the onion is done we pour into the skillet the tomato juice we had previously grind and let the mix cook over a medium-high heat, again stirring from time to time and watching over till the sauce is thick and rich.
Then we add the fried meat to the tomato sauce and mix it intimately: they love each other. Now season with freshly ground pepper, oregano –fresh if possible–, finely chopped parsley, and salt till it gets tasty, keeping in mind that we'll add cheese, which provides salt generously.
We have reached so far the exciting point of stuffing the tomatoes with our onion-tomato-meat blend. Add a pinch of salt and a turn of ground pepper into the inside of each tomato, and with the help of a teaspoon we will feed the open mouths of those beauties.
Now we accommodate our eight stuffed tomatoes in an oven tray or whatever you have at hand that fits previously greased with 2 olive oil tablespoons. I've used a cast iron skillet that fits in my little oven and performs incredibly well when I bake the Tatin apple pie.
We put our handsome tomatoes into a preheated oven at 190-200 ºC. You should know that to cook properly in the oven you have to become his/her friend, as every oven performs differently. But the tomatoes should be there 30-40 minutes till they present this face:
Then, as Germans say, 'die Zeit ist reif', that is, we have reach the moment to spread the previously grated cheese over our tomatoes.
Freshly grated cheese keeps all its aroma and flavour. It is not so expensive as the cheese bought grated and there are less plastic packaging involved.
Let the tomatoes cook in the oven, at the same temperature, 190-200 ºC, 10 minutes or the time your oven asks to give them this hue. Let'em cool a bit and enjoy.
Parsley contains a huge amount of oestrogen. Scented, delicate, beautiful, repairing. Parsley, walk with me. Now brevity, totality, and melancholy. We are on Poe's arms.
