Turkish Stuffed Tomatoes

While you can certainly fix these tomatoes any time of year, naturally when you have access to good ripe tomatoes, it can make this dish especially tasty. I've made this a few times, but when I made it for the photos I took for this article (winter), there were not terribly good choices for the size of ripe tomatoes I really wanted, so I decided to go with somewhat larger tomatoes, but I only used three tomatoes, instead of four. I like the heat of chili peppers, but I used 2 chili peppers and it didn't really make the filling too hot. 

Similar recipes are used in parts of the Middle East, especially in Lebanon.

Ingredients (4 servings):

4 large (baseball size) whole fresh tomatoes

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 pound ground lamb

1/2 cup finely chopped onion

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 or 2 small chili peppers (according to heat preference), finely chopped

3 tablespoons pine nuts

1 teaspoon ground allspice

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 heaping tablespoon chopped parsley 

1 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 teaspoon salt

extra virgin olive oil for serving

Cut the tops off of the tomatoes, but keep the tops, scoop out the seeds and tough interior stem. Put the tomatoes into a baking dish, set aside. Heat the tablespoon of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Saute the onion and garlic for 2 minutes, then add the ground lamb, and continue sauteing for about 5 minutes, breaking up any clumps of ground lamb as it cooks. Add the finely chopped chili pepper, pine nuts, ground allspice, ground cinnamon, black pepper and salt; then saute another 5 minutes, or until the lamb is cooked through, stirring the ingredients around periodically. Heat the oven to 350 F, and while the oven heats up, spoon the lamb mixture into the tomatoes and pack it down "somewhat lightly" (you don't want to pack it tightly) and replace the tops. Bake for 30 minutes, or until the tomatoes are tender (use a fork to pierce a tomato near the top, middle and bottom to see if it's done). The baking cooks the tomatoes and simply reheats the stuffing thoroughly. Serve with some extra virgin olive oil (preferably Greek, but whatever you have) to drizzle over the tomatoes. 

 

The uncooked stuffed tomatoes ...

WORD HISTORY:

Shield-This word is related to "scale" (device for weighing), a word from Germanic, but in this case borrowed from Old Norse (a North Germanic language), and to "scale" (skin covering on fish and some animals), another word from Germanic, but this meaning was borrowed from French, which had it from Germanic Frankish, and to "shell" (covering for eggs and for certain sea or other creatures) a word from the Germanic roots of English. "Shield" goes back to Indo European "skel," which had the notion "to cut, to split, to chip." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "skelduz," meaning "board, flat piece of wood cut from a larger piece to provide protection." This gave Old English "scield/scild," with the same meaning, and used figuratively simply to mean "protection." This then became "scheld/shild," before the modern form. The verb form goes back to "scildan," meaning "to protect with a shield, to protect," which spawned "gescildan," meaning "to use a shield for protection," but also, "to protect, to defend," and these joined to become "schelden/schilden," before the modern form. Relatives in the other Germanic languages: German and Low German have "Schild," Dutch has "schild," West Frisian has "skyld," Danish and Norwegian have "skjold," Icelandic has "skjöldur" and Swedish has "sköld," and all of the words mean "shield providing protection in battle," but with figurative meanings, like their English relative. Standard German uses "der Schild" for "shield," although some dialects use "das Schild," and standard German uses "das Schild" for "sign," as many signs have long been in the shape of shields.