Last week, it was my turn to cook for our office's weekly shared lunch, where one person makes a homemade meal for the whole office. I was trying to come up with something that was summery and a good lunch option, but also filling because everyone here really likes to eat! I came across a recipe for stuffed tomatoes, and modified it a lot to make it my own. They came out delicious! Here is the recipe:
Ingredients:
10 to 12 medium to large tomatoes
2 packages of Italian sausage (about 8 to 10 sausages total)
About 2 cups of croutons
1 small container of ricotta cheese (the regular size, I think 8 oz)
1 small container of diced tomatoes (or 1/2 regular sized can)
minced garlic (I used about 2/3 a teaspoon of the garlic you can buy pre-minced in the jar)
fresh basil leaves
olive oil
Instructions:
Cut tops off of tomatoes, and use a spoon to carefully hollow out the seeds and core. Set upside down on paper towels to drain as you prepare the mixture for stuffing.
Slice sausage into small pieces. In a saucepan or deep frying pan, heat up about a tablespoon of olive oil. Add garlic and cook for a couple of minutes until garlic is slightly browned. Add sausage. Cook until sausage is done throughout. Use a spatula to break the sausage into even smaller pieces as it is cooking. Once sausage is thoroughly cooked, stir in diced tomatoes. Remove from the hot pan to a mixing bowl and let cool slightly. Reserve most of the drippings.
Preheat oven to 350
Slowly stir croutons into the sausage. Add ricotta cheese and stir. You can then add a couple of tablespoons of the drippings from the pan and some crushed basil leaves. Stuff mixture into the tomatoes so that they each are full to slightly over the top. Place into a 2 inch deep baking pan. They can be touching each other. Drizzle with olive oil.
Bake for about 35 minutes in the oven at 350. Then place into the broiler for 5 minutes or less to brown the tops. Add a leaf of basil to the top of each tomato and serve hot.
Notes / Thoughts:
I think that if I were doing this again, I would try crumbled goat cheese instead of ricotta. The texture of the goat cheese would probably be nice if it was tossed in lightly to the mixture, whereas the ricotta coated the mixture smoothly.
I cut the casings off of my sausage before cooking it, which made it a lot easier to break it up smaller while cooking. You want there to be different sized chunks in the mixture.
I used plain croutons that I bought in the bakery section of Whole Foods, so instead of large salad croutons they were basically just small pieces of bread toast. I think you could probably make your own from toast for this recipe.
I served this with ciabatta bread and a side salad, and it was very yummy! I think this could be served either as a side dish or as a main entree.
