Stuffed Tomatoes Antibes Style
Serves: 4
Preparation time: 60 minutes
Tomates à l'Antiboise, a well known Provençal dish from Antibes on the Côte d'Azur. Really easy to make. Best of all, you can prepare them a day in advance.
Tomates à l'Antiboise can also be part of a tapas array. But I would use small tomatoes (not cherry tomatoes) and just 1 tomato per tapas dish.
Ingredients:
- 8 firm medium sized tomatoes
- 4 tbsp olive oil
- 1 medium sized onion finely chopped
- coarse sea salt and freshly ground pepper
- 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
- 2 anchovies, rinsed
- about 10 basil leaves
- 60 gr (1 cup) fresh bread crumbs
- 2 hard cooked eggs, shelled and chopped
- extra dried bread crumbs for sprinkling
Preparation:
Slice off the top of each tomato and scrape out the flesh. Discard the top's stem. Chop the top and scraped out flesh and reserve it. Salt and pepper the inside of the tomatoes. Turn them upside down over a paper towel and let them drain for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Grease a gratin dish with 1 tbsp. of olive oil. Warm 2 tbsp. olive oil in a small saucepan. Add onion and garlic and cook them until soft, about 10 minutes. Raise the heat to high, add the reserved tomato flesh and sauté quickly until the flesh begins to fall apart, about 5 - 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside.
In a mortar pound together the coarse salt, pepper, anchovies and basil to form a paste. Stir in 1 tbsp. olive oil. Add the 60 gr (1 cup) of bread crumbs. Add this paste to the onion tomato mixture. Add the chopped eggs. If the mixture seems too stiff, add extra olive oil. Stuff the tomato shells with the mixture. Place them in a gratin dish, sprinkle them with the extra bread crumbs and dribble a bit of olive oil over it. Bake until tomatoes are tender and bread crumbs are golden brown, about 30 minutes.
Serve hot as a vegetable course or as a side dish.
