to-may-to, to-mah-to

However you say it, they are delicious. I love tomatoes, I can eat them like apples. I don't necessarily recommend it, because that tends to be a messy endeavor, but if you are brave and/or keep a Tide pen in your purse, go for it! My favorite kind that I have found are called "Super Cherry" tomatoes. Whether that is a brand name or just some sort of variety of the plant, I don't know. What I do know is that I got them in a small plastic container (like what strawberries come in) at my local Newflower farmer's market and they are crazy delicious. They are a bit bigger than un-super cherry tomatoes (on average the size of a golf ball) and slightly sweeter. They are similar to Campari tomatoes, but a little smaller and less expensive. The PERFECT size for this dish that I discovered via Scrumptious Blog:

Tomatoes Baked with Garlic Butter and Cream


picture via scrumptious blog

OH.MY.GOD.

Juno from the Scrumptious Blog describes the finished product as "spangled with little sequins of butter." Isn't that a beautiful description? I love sequins, and while I'm not sure that my tomatoes turned out as glamorous as hers, I'd be willing to bet they were every bit as tasty. Juno is blogging and baking from South Africa, so I had to play a bit with the temperatures and baking times because she is using degrees Celsius. Her instructions say to bake the first go-round at 180 degrees, and the second at 160 degrees. After consulting Google, my estimate for that conversion in degrees Fahrenheit was 350 and 325, respectively. I guess my math was wrong because my first attempt at making this was not impressive. I used regular large-ish tomatoes on the vine and baked for 15 minutes at 350 and then added the cream and put them back in for 10 minutes at 325. The tomatoes absorbed the flavors of the garlic and the herbs, but they weren't soft so I put them back in the oven and would check back every 10 minutes or so. After an additional 30 minutes they were softER but still not soft, and were generally unremarkable. But I'm stubborn and wanted these to be amazing, so I pressed on. I played with the time and temperature on my next attempt and hit the jackpot. So I present to you, my Americanized version of Juno's recipe, Fahrenheit-425 Tomatoes!*

4 medium sized tomatoes
3 T softened butter
1 fat clove garlic, peeled and crushed
2-3 t of dried Italian-ish herbs (I used basil and rosemary)
salt and black pepper
2/3 cup cream (Real cream. Not half and half, not low-fat. If you're gonna do this, do it right.)

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Take the tomatoes and cut the top off, slightly angled in toward where the stem would be, sort of like the first step in carving a pumpkin- you want to cut into the top so you can pull off the 'lid,' but DON'T cut through the bottom skin. If you do that, all the deliciousness will leak out, and that pretty much defeats the purpose of all the work you are about to do.

Combine your butter, garlic and herbs, and then put a dab of the mixture into each tomato, add a little salt and pepper and then bake for 25 minutes. Then you'll take them out and gently pour the cream inside each tomato. Don't stir, and do expect a bit of a mess. You may have some cream left over but that's ok. You can save it for coffee or take a bath in it or whatever. Turn the heat down to 350 and bake for another 20-25 minutes. You want the walls of the tomato to be soft but still intact, and if the edges start to get a little bit dark that's ok, but we aren't roasting here, we don't want them charred.

My digital camera died so I couldn't take a pic of my finished tomatoes. Tragic, I know. But trust me, they did spangle with butter sequins. It was like having a disco ball in my kitchen, a decorating idea I had not previously considered but now I'm toying with.


picture via weheartit

*It's a working title. I'm open to suggestions.