GCC: Tomatoes Stuffed with Rice

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This was my second recipe from our Gutsy Cook line up this past week.

As the recipe in Saveur mentions, Italian has the stuff vegetables thing down pack.  Pretty much any antipasto table will have a vegetable that has been stuffed with meat, other veggies and in this case rice.

What appeal to me about this recipe is that fact that the most time consuming task here is prepping the tomatoes.  You have to trim them, and then scoop out the inner pulp without puncturing the walls.

This little prepping step may be a zilch for some cooks.  No biggie – cut top, scoop out pulp, and cut bottom.  Done.

For my perfect convulsive ODC twin this took a while, since I wanted them perfectly hollow out, and wanted them to stand up tall and pretty and the tops needed to be at the right angle and the bottoms…

Never mind. (I know, I got a problem – I’m trying to deal.  Lets move on.)

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Dinner Party 101

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Just as I love cooking, the other thing I love to do is throw a dinner party.  I think this goes hand in hand with most cooks.  In my case this need comes from my Italian genes (and Latin upbringing) which I’m totally convince have a code within my DNA called “need to feed everyone around you now or die!.

It is a known fact that the Italians are very serious about their food. Why shouldn’t they be? After all it is the food that brings together friends and families. This is why we find the Italians to be very fond of spending long hours on the table and meal times expanding over the span of a couple of hours.

When the Italians sit down to eat they literally forget about the world and are in no hurry whatsoever to gobble down their food and get back to life.

And that is what I needed, to sit down and forget about the world, at least for a couple of hours. And the best way to do this is to surround myself with funny and smart individuals – enter my main “chicas”

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Baked Leeks in Béchamel Sauce

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A couple of weeks back when I was planning our Paella party – that never happened, I had round up a couple of tapas recipes to served while our paella was cooking on the open flame.

This dish was one in the list.  Today, as I opened the refrigerator to get some cheese to make myself and Tom a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches, I notice the leeks and remember this recipe.  After a bit more of investigating, realized that I had everything I needed to make it and off I went to test my memory bank. I did this on the fly, because after looking for over 10 minutes ALL OVER MY HOUSE could not find the original printed/marked recipe in any of my print outs or books.

I’m happy to say my memory is just fine, thank-you-very-much.

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