Baked Tomatoes Stuffed with Rice

The most common stuffings for vegetables are breadcrumbs, meat and tuna but in Rome tomatoes are stuffed with raw rice, which cooks in the moisture from the tomatoes. However, this depends on using very large, firm tomatoes of a type not easily available outside Italy. So here I recommend that you boil the rice briefly first.

The tomatoes can be eaten as part of an antipasto or as a first course. My mother used to make them for a first course, as another way of serving rice.<