Tomatoes stuffed with basil-scented rice

Is life too short to stuff a tomato? Not if eating stuffed vegetables is what brings you joy. I end THE SECRET OF COOKING with a couple of feast meals. One of them is a ‘stuffed vegetable party with slightly Italian flavours’ consisting of stuffed vegetables three ways: tomatoes stuffed with basil-scented rice, peppers stuffed with garlicky fennel potatoes and courgettes (zucchini) stuffed with ricotta, lemon and pine nuts. I deliberately wanted to celebrate stuffed vegetables, partly because I love them so much - something magical happens to stuffed vegetables in an oven as they turn wrinkly and sweet- and partly because they have been much maligned.


I’ve been thinking about this in the light of the death of Shirley Conran earlier this year. Conran was a journalist and writer ( as well as many other things including the founder of the Maths Anxiety Trust). She was most famous for the phrase ‘life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’.

I can see where Conran was coming from. Life is certainly too short to do unnecessary things that you find annoying.

But is life really too short to stuff a vegetable? Not for me, anyway.

While the delicious late-summer tomatoes are still around, taking the time to stuff some of them and enjoy the perfume of basil and garlic cooking inside the sweet red tomatoes seems like a great use of time. It doesn’t even take that long. The rice-stuffed tomatoes in my book (inspired by @rachelaliceroddy) take around 20 minutes of prep time and 40 minutes of hands-off baking. Ideally you will then leave them for another hour and serve them warm. It’s one of those dishes that you look back on as a beacon of summer evenings in the winter months. I often think of the vegetable stuffing scene in BEFORE MIDNIGHT while I am making them.

As for whether life is too short to do such things, only you can judge for yourself. whether this is true for you, or not.

What I will say is that of all the reasons to cook, one of the best is to be remembered. My sister had a friend, a poet called Craig Arnold who died far too young, while hiking on a Japanese island at the age of forty-two. There are many ways to remember Craig. He was a loving father and friend. He wrote beautiful poems about grapefruits and artichokes.

You can read his poem ARTICHOKE here:

https://www.poetryfoundation.o...

Some of his poems won prizes. But after his death, people also remembered Craig’s cooking. ‘He stuffed vegetables,’ said one of his friends, with deep emotion, and went on to explain that the way Craig stuffed vegetables with rice and pine nuts and currants when he had people round was just the coolest thing. We live on through the dishes we made and that can't be a waste of time, if you ask me.

P.S. The next stuffed tomatoes I want to make are the ones in WILD FIGS AND FENNEL by @letitia_ann-clark where basil leaves are used as imitation tomato leaves.

Tomatoes stuffed with basil-scented rice

This was the recipe which converted me to the merits of stuffed vegetables as a comfort food. The perfume of the basil and garlic cooking inside the sweet tomatoes with rice and oil smells like summer. I first made it following Rachel Roddy’s recipe in the Guardian. The main change I have made is to parcook the rice slightly, which cuts down on the cooking time.

Serves 4 as a stand-alone main course or 8 as part of a feast

160g risotto rice
12 ripe medium vine tomatoes
4 cloves of garlic, grated or crushed
20g fresh basil, chopped, plus more to serve 80ml olive oil

Boil a kettle. Cook the rice in boiling salted water for 5 minutes. Drain. Meanwhile, cut the top off each tomato. Using an ice-cream scoop or a spoon, scoop out the flesh and seeds of the tomatoes and put them into a large measuring jug. Put the tomato shells upside down on a plate to drain. Blitz the tomato flesh, juice and seeds with a hand-held blender. Mix it with the rice, basil and oil and a decent whack of salt.

Preheat the oven to 180°C fan. Put the tomato shells into a large roasting tray, sprinkle them with salt inside and fill them with the rice mixture, making sure that each one has a good ratio of liquid to rice. Put the lids back on the tomatoes. You will almost certainly have quite a lot of the stuffing mixture left over. Put this into a small baking dish. Put the tin of tomatoes plus the baking dish of stuffing in the oven and bake for 40 minutes, checking after 30, until the tomatoes are soft and wrinkled and the rice is cooked. If the rice seems raw or is drying out, add a splash more water to each tomato and give it a bit longer. When the tomatoes come out of the oven, remove the lid of each one and top up with the extra stuffing from the baking dish. Add a final sprinkle of basil and replace the lids. Wait at least half an hour before eating (the charm of a stuffed vegetable can't be appreciated when it is too hot).