Yummy stuffed tomatoes and peppers, with feta cheese!!! Droooooolling!!!!

What’s your favourite dish? Mine, at least this time of the year, is stuffed tomatoes. It is a very traditional dish here in Greece, especially during the summer, whereupon we have many fresh and tasteful vegetables like tomatoes, all kinds of peppers, aubergines, vine leaves, zucchinis and onions. Yes, you can stuff onions too!

You will find that this is a very tasteful solution, especially if you have a lot of people coming over for dinner, as it comes out plenty and almost everyone loves it!

I will give you the basic recipe and you can do your twist, as I do in my dishes, depending on your tastes.

Ingredients: 5 tomatoes, 5 peppers, 2 aubergines, 2 zucchinis, 2 onions, 10 big spoons (half full) of rise, 1½ cup of olive oil, Fresh Parsley, Fresh Mint, ½ cup of pine nuts, ½ cup of raisins (I put both yellow and black), Salt, Pepper, 3 extra tomatoes for the filling, 1 tbsp of sugar (optional, depending if your vegetables are off season), 2 tbsp of breadcrumbs.

We begin by carefully emptying our 5 tomatoes and trying to keep their cups attached to the many body of the tomato. The same stands with peppers -we empty their seeds. Also, we empty the aubergines and the zucchinis.

We cut the remainders of the aubergines and the zucchinis into small pieces as we will use them into our stuffing. We also chop up the onions. We grind the stuffing of the tomatoes. We mince the parsley and mint.

We use a shallow pan to prepare our stuffing. Firstly we put half the olive oil along with the chopped onions. We add the aubergines and the zucchinis and we let them wither for a few minutes. We add the rise, the tomato juice of the 5 tomatoes, salt and pepper. We add 1 cup of water and leave for another 5 minutes. In the end we add the pine nuts, the raisins, the parsley and the mint.

Our stuffing should be watery. We begin stuffing our tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and zucchinis (should fill in up to ¾ of each vegetable, not full) and placing them on a baking pan, the one close to the other.

In a bowl we place the remaining 3 tomatoes, which we have grinded up, the remaining oil, some salt and pepper. We pour this sauce onto our stuffed vegetables. We mix the sugar with the breadcrumbs and sprinkle our stuffed tomatoes. We cover the pun with aluminium foil and place it in a pre-heated oven at high temperature. In 3 quarters of the hour, we uncover the aluminium foil, and we bake until they are brown.

Extra tip: sometimes, I prefer to stuff onions or vine leaves. They are smaller, but tastier. You use the same stuffing, but you should first boil the onions for 10-15 minutes and let them cool before you use their leaves.

Stuffed tomatoes can be eaten hot or cold. I prefer to eat them at room temperature, with feta cheese. Enjoy!