Summer Monday Food Blogging

(Photo Credit: The Food Network)

Grilled Tomato and Procrastination Edition

My typist has not one but two conferences to get ready for next week (this one and this one), which no doubt explains why she finds herself irresistibly drawn to the idea of blogging about last night's dinner. I reported yesterday that she went to Takoma Park's wonderful farmer's market and came home loaded with the bounties of early summer -- strawberries, basil, some early tomatoes, and a delicious chipotle goat cheese made by the Cherry Glen Goat Cheese Company of Boyds, MD.

Since there's a depression on and the moms are humble state employees who have already survived one round of furloughs and have a hunch they'll have to endure another in the coming year, the new policy in Roxie's World is to leave no morsel of food behind. Buy it, cook it, eat it. Period. Scrape the mold off the bread. Re-purpose the truckload of rice that comes with every order of takeout from our favorite Indian restaurant. Invite some poor unsuspecting soul to dinner and make her eat cherries until she begs for mercy. Times are hard, kids. We all have to make sacrifices.

Did I mention that my typist has two conferences to prepare for next week?

Anyway, despite using a sizable chunk of the delicious chipotle goat cheese in the scrambled eggs she made for brunch, by supper time yesterday Moose was inordinately worried about how to make use of the rest of the cheese. Then she started thinking about the tomatoes. She had bought a cluster of five because they looked so pretty, but the moms do not have a good track record when it comes to tomato consumption. They'll motor through the first two or three and then the others will languish in the fruit bowl until suddenly Moose realizes there is a disgusting odor in the kitchen and a tell-tale puddle of water in the fruit bowl. Eeewwww!

I digress. Moose had never grilled a tomato in her life, but in the midst of worrying about the goat cheese and thinking about the tomatoes and not writing her conference papers and feeling a little sad about the prospect of my demise, she suddenly found herself fixated on the idea of grilled tomatoes and goat cheese. She even talked about it on the long walk I sent her and Goose off to take late in the afternoon. "Doesn't that sound good?" she said as they strolled along in the golden light of a splendid summer day. "I'll Google it when we get home."

She did, and she found this recipe on Epicurious, but she didn't have any sage or green onions, so she kind of had to improvise, which is not Moose's forté as a cook. (She slavishly follows recipes, while Goose could whip up a feast out of peanut butter, brussels sprouts, and a couple of stale crackers if she had to.) The truth is, if you've got a good goat cheese, you don't really need a recipe for grilled tomatoes stuffed with goat cheese, but here's another one from the Food Network, just in case you can't bear to work without a net.

And here is Moose's Not Exactly a Recipe for Grilled Tomatoes Stuffed with Goat Cheese:

2 medium-sized tomatoes
1/3 cup chipotle (or not) goat cheese, crumbled
1 teaspoon olive oil (you won't need this if you're using a really soft goat cheese)
2 tablespoons shallot, finely chopped
1 tablespoon basil, finely chopped
pinch of salt and a twist of black pepper

Using a small sharp knife, remove cone-shaped piece 2 inches wide and 1 inch deep from top of each tomato. Mix all the other ingredients together in a small bowl. Jam as much of that mixture as you can down into the tomatoes.

Grill for 5-10 minutes on a medium-hot grill. Place them right on the rack, and close the grill cover.

The moms had these with grilled tuna, grilled pineapple, couscous, and a crispy white wine while watching the season premier of HBO's True Blood. Dinner was delicious. Their verdict on the quirky show about vampires who achieve respectability through synthetic blood? Meh -- I coulda had a V8.