My local Slow Food chapter has a book club. It’s not currently convenient for me to make the meetings, but I’m reading the books on my own for fun. The first one I finished is On Rue Tatin, Living and Cooking in a French Town, by Susan Herrmann Loomis. Loomis is a chef and writer who went to a Paris cooking school for an apprenticeship in the 1980s, and has been there pretty much ever since. She fell in love with the French food, countryside, new friends, and culture (which is mostly food).
Her American husband is an architect who followed her to France before their marriage, at first staying to be with her, draw, etc., but soon also fell in love with France, luckily. After her apprenticeship, Loomis takes on a one-year cooking position and then starts working on books about French food while her husband is mostly focused on refurbishing a house they bought in Normandy. The house was many hundreds of years old, having been a convent for 300 of those years, and falling into decay afterward with other owners.
The story follows their small family through many life adventures revolving around working, living, and eating in France. It’s a fun and interesting read because of the many lessons in French culture that they need to learn along the way. Each chapter ends with a couple of recipes related to the events described in that chapter. I will try some of the recipes, almost all of them are new to me, starting with a modified version of the stuffed tomatoes featured at the end of chapter one (I didn’t have an hour to wait for raw meat to bake in the oven). My tomatoes are coming in like crazy and I’m trying to use them and give them away, but will probably end up doing some canning before they go bad.
I cut the amount of ground pork from 1 ¾ pound, and considered using some kind of bean or rice as a substitute and didn’t, but it turned out I had plenty of stuffing for over 4 pounds of tomatoes. I’m not sure why it says “juicy” tomatoes, because you cut out the inside of the tomato. I had three cups of tomato guts which I put in a one-quart zip bag and stuck in the freezer. I’ll put pasta sauce on the menu for next week to make use of them.
Danie’s Stuffed Tomatoes
2 slices fresh bread, about 2 oz each
½ C milk
4 lbs juicy tomatoes
Sea salt and ground pepper
2 T extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, minced
2 crushed garlic cloves
8 oz chopped mushrooms
1 lb ground pork
¼ C fresh tarragon leaves
1 C loosely packed parsley
2 eggs
Preheat oven to 425. Break the bread into little pieces in a small bowl and pour the milk over. Stir and press the bread into the milk and leave it to soak. Cut the tops off the tomatoes and reserve the tops. Cut around the inside of the tomato and use a spoon to scoop out the seeds and most of the pith of the tomato. Salt and pepper the tomato shells.
Brown the meat and onion in a pan, then add the mushrooms and garlic and cook for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, after the bread absorbs the milk, add the tarragon, parsley, and eggs to the bread mixture and stir. Add the bread mixture to the pan of meat and combine well. Pack the tomatoes with the filling, pressing it in firmly, and set the tops over the filling. Bake for 25 minutes.
