Roast stuffed tomatoes

An Old - Fashioned Idea, but one that should never have fallen from favor. The basic technique is to hollow out a tomato, then fill it with its chopped pulp and a variety of other ingredients before roasting. The combination of the flavorful roast tomato, filling, and pan juices is really wonderful, and since you need not skin the tomato first (in fact, the skin holds the whole thing together), the preparation time is minimal.

And it’s amazing how many flavors marry well with the tomato shell—we range from simple shrimp prepared in a Provençal manner to bitter greens smoothed with cheese to a combination of a couple of kinds of tomatoes. From there we go to a Middle Eastern-style stuffing of lamb (you can use other ground meat) and finally, to an unusual dessert—tomato being, after all a fruit.