Hello ladies & gentlemen!
Today is a big day at ryansleigh.com.
I will be introducing a new blogging category: COOKING.
That’s right! I’m an avid cook. I absolutely love to cook. There are few things more satisfying to me than cooking your own meals, knowing exactly what ingredients you are putting into them, and cooking them to YOUR OWN tastes. I love the reactions I get from some people when I serve them up a nice dish that I created and I love savoring every single bite of a healthy vibrant meal. It is without question that I would blog about this eventually!
To start this category off, here is a fantastic dish that I have recently learnt!
Stuffed Tomatoes with Beef
Ingredients
6 to 8 medium to large sized organic tomatoes
500g lean ground free-range/organic beef
1 cup cooked organic brown rice
1 medium sized organic red onion
1 tsp nutmeg
1 free-range/organic egg
salt & pepper
butter
Alright first things first. Wash your hands and get all your ingredients out and ready to be utilized when you need them. Make sure your cooking surfaces are clean and you are relaxed. I like to take my socks off in the kitchen! Preheat your oven to 350° F.
This recipe calls for at least 1 cup of cooked brown rice. So to begin with you’ll want to have some rice cooked or cooking. If you don’t know how to do this, it’s very easy to make basic brown rice! All you need is a pot, rice, water, salt and butter (optional). Put a 2:1 ratio of water to rice in a pot (eg. 2 cups water to 1 cup of rice), add a touch of salt and butter, bring it to a boil, put the lid on it, drop the heat to low and let it cook undisturbed for roughly 35 – 45 minutes.
Wash each tomato under warm water and slice the top of the tomato right off so you can scoop the insides out. Once every tomato has been washed and it’s top removed, take a spoon and “carve out” the insides into a bowl for later use in sauces or whatever else you may create or into the garbage can. Set the tomatoes aside on a plate upside down to let the remaining juice flow out.
Take your onion and slice it up into small pieces. Think no bigger than the size of a penny. The way I like doing this is by taking the whole onion and slicing it from side to side. Then I stack the separate slices on top of each other and then slice the stack from side to side again.
Go back to your tomatoes. Flip them back over and sprinkle a small amount of salt & pepper into each of them. Once again set them aside.
Take your beef and throw it into a large mixing bowl. Take your egg, crack it and pour it in the beef. Using your hands break the yolk into the white of the egg and mix the beef and the egg together. Now add the cooked rice and your sliced onion and once again mix it all together. Finally, add the nutmeg and sprinkle some salt & pepper to taste and mix it all together once again. I use my hands.
Now you’re ready to take your meat mixture and put it inside the hollowed tomatoes! Do this any way you want, I like to just simply use a spoon and then pack it in with my hands. Be careful though! The tomatoes are delicate and their flesh will break easily if enough pressure is applied.
Finally, take a chunk of butter and use it to grease up a baking dish, preferably Pyrex, that is at least 1″ deep and large enough to fit the 6 or 8 tomatoes. Place the tomatoes on the baking dish with the holes facing up, not down. They are now ready to be put into the oven! Hint: You can even put a small slice of butter on top of each tomato before you put them in the oven to add some extra flavor.
The stuffed tomatoes will take approximately 20 – 25 minutes to cook. It is the beef that you are really cooking in this dish, the tomatoes are fairly resistant to heat and they will maintain their shape so long as you pick and use fairly firm tomatoes. This dish goes excellent with simple green leafy salads!
That’s about it for this addition! If you’ve got any questions just shoot and I’ll be happy to answer!
See ya next time!