How to cook roula's greek stuffed tomatoes

To clean > Put the tomatoes in cold water. Let them soak for at least 10 minutes then dry them off and set them on a slicing board.

Cut up the onions and paprika's (bell peppers) in small dices

Cut the chili pepper and garlic, but keep them apart from the onions and paprikas.

Save these in a separate bowl.

Cut of the caps of your tomatoes.

Cut of a small piece of the bottom, so it will stand solide in the oven.

Hollow the tomatoes, but save the inside; we'll be needing that later on 😄

Save this in a separate bowl.

Cut up the zucchini in small dices and save the in a seperate bowl. > Save the green (chopped off) top, in the bowl with your diced zucchini and it won't turn brown <

Get a large pan and put in some olive oil and cook the onions and paprika untill the onions are glassy.

Stir well so the veggies won't burn!

When the onions are glassy, put in your pepper and garlic. > Prepare for the fabulous smell! <

After a few minutes stirring, put in the zucchini.

Quickly after the zucchini you can add the inside of the hollowed tomatoes.

Add a good teaspoon of Rosemary.

Salt

And pepper (use more that I have in my hand here!)

Then mesure a (small) cup of rice. Make sure this is rice that cooks fast in about 8 minutes!

Add 1,5 cups of water together with the rice in the baked vegetables. Let this simmer for the time the rice needs to cook, in my case; 8 minutes.

In the mean time you can chop some parsly and basil.

This is what it should look like when the cooking time is over. The water is almost gone. Leave it to steam a bit dryer for a few minutes, it's not suppose to be very wet when we stuff the tomatoes.

Put in the cut fresh herbs.

Stir the herbs through the rice-veggie-mixture.

Set the oven to a temperature of 180 degrees. (Celcius)

Stuff your hollowed tomatoes and press hard (not too hard or the tomato will break) and fill it up rich.

When the tomatoes are filled, mesure a 1/2 cup of olive oil and 1 cup of water.

Put this in a baking dish.

Place your stuffed tomatoes in the dish. Place back the cut off caps and grease the tomatoes with the mixture they are standing in. This will prevent them from burning in the oven.

First place the tomatoes in the oven for 20 minutes in the middle of the oven.

After 20 minutes I saw the caps were not realy ruffled yet, so I let them in for another 10 minutes. > You have to keep an eye on them in this time! < (Oops crappy picture! :-D)

After (in total) 30 minutes, they looked like this. >> Watch out! The oil mixture is VERY hot now. Be carefull when you take out the baking dish please! <<

Place them on a nice plate and serve it with a good piece of meat. Or keep it vegetarian and serve a fresh salad on the side.

Oh and don't forget some bubbles, this meal is a celebration! Thanks to Roula, our Greek friend for sharing this with us, JAMAS!! > this means "Cheers" in Greek <

It's possible that you have some rice-veggie-mix left over, 'cos it didn't fit the tomatoes. Don't throw it away! Put it in a big omelet the next day and you have a superduper fast & healthy meal!