Easy-As Pie

My favourite vegetables are technically fruit - tomatoes and eggplant. While I've been delighted by the cheapness and the year-long abundance of eggplants here in Perth, tomatoes are a different matter. Oh they're there all year - but even when it's the proper season for them - in the words of Nick Cave: "I think it's well understood, tomatoes, they just aint no good."

So ok, he was talking about people, not tomatoes, but if you know the song and its tone of lament, you'll get an idea about my feelings of disapointment in the tomatoes of today and my nostalgia for a time when they had taste. Like September. September we went to France and Luc's mum made tomato salad with large plump tomatoes from her garden. Yeah, that's RIGHT, WE remember, my taste-buds screamed, tomatoes used to taste like this! THIS is why you liked them - not their hard-to-cut smoothness, not their please-blanch-and-peel recipes nor their seeds nor their bitterness. It was TASTE, and taste is mostly why I love cooking and also red wine.

Half the reason I once moved to Chile was red wine, the other half was Pablo Neruda, a nobel prize-winning poet. And this is what he had to say about tomatoes:
Ode to Tomatoes

Sadly even with Perth's endless summer the tomatoes are mainly hard, pale and tasteless. But still I love them, I can't deny them, I'll always love them till the day that I die. So what to do? My garden having failed to produce any tomatoes (despite being quite good at growing tall tomato plants), I have settled for eating grape tomatoes if I want them fresh, or, as in this recipe, baking them to bring out the flavour - it really does WONDERS!

Sometimes I just cut them in half and stick them on a tray in the oven, but here I've made more substantial stuffed tomatoes. They are good with rice, wild rice and other grains too. Here I've used red quinoa - partly because it was there to be used, and partly because it's supposed to be a great protein source.





Stuffed Baked Tomatoes
1 large tomato per person
approx 1 T quinoa (prob still too much) per person
vegetable stock (liquid) enough to cover quinoa in pan/rice cooker
1 t per tomato of LSA mix (Linseed, Sunflower and Almond)
Scattering of your choice of fruit and nuts like:
-dates
-figs
-raisins
-currants
-pine nuts
-almonds
-walnuts
Sprinkling of spices like
-cinnamon
-sumac
-paprika
-allspice

Using steady hands and a knife you trust (small paring knives or those cheap $7 Victorinox ones are good) slice around the top of each tomato leaving a few cm uncut to act as a hinge for this tomato lid. Use a strong metal spoon to cut through the 'ribs' inside the tomato (the part anchoring all the seeds to the walls ). Scoop out the ribs and seeds so you are left with an empty bowl shell. (the insides can be stored and used later in a tomato sauce etc).
Put quinoa in a rice cooker, cover with liquid vegetable stock, turn on rice cooker and leave to do its thing. You'll know when quinoa is done because curly white tails appear and the quinoa won't be hard anymore). When the quinoa is cooked, mix in the fruit, nuts and spices (with a rice-cooker-safe tool of course!).

That's right, my tripod is not so smooth. I'll get a decent tripod one day, just you wait.

I also made one of Luc's favourites - Leek tart,


and a madeup invention, babaganoush pie. We had half an eggplant in the fridge so I roasted it in the oven till it turned black and the structure collapsed. This is a good thing. When you roast eggplant in the oven or over an open flame or BBQ, it becomes really soft (without having to fry in oil!) and best of all, it gets this delicious smoky flavour. All you do it when it's cooked is to peel the skin off (it comes off very nicely) and chop up the flesh into chunks and mix with some garlic, felafel spice mix and tahini and this will make a very nice small pie filling.