Stuffed Tomatoes........mmmmm

I briefly saw an article about Stuffed Tomatoes recently, which of course made my mouth drool. I had never had a stuffed tomato before I whipped up our dinner tonight, but I have now found a new favorite dinner :)

 I wasn't quite sure how to cook it, so I googled a few recipes, then tweaked it to make it my own. Our taste buds were pleasantly pleased.

Its easiest to use the tomatoes with a good round shape and make sure they will have a good thick skin, so they won't fall a part as much when they cook. Then wash how ever many tomatoes you are going to need, and cut the top part off, making sure to get any green out from the stem. They would look about what the above picture looks like.

Then with a spoon, scoop out the insides into a bowl to put aside for the filling.

and like the above picture here too.

Then mix in your seasonings, I used about a tsp of the Nature's Seasons, I like it because it has salt in it and NO brain cell killing MSG :)  I put in some Italian seasoning too. mmm mmm

I noticed other recipes called for seasoned bread crumbs, so I just used croutons and they worked awesomely. The croutons I used worked great because they were smaller.I put about a cup of them in, you will probably want to use more though, depending on how many tomatoes you are stuffing. Mix them into the tomato mixture too.

This next part really made the flavor of these. My sweet beautiful mother in law planted me a Basil plant when she lived with me a few years ago. I am sorry to say I have personally never used it until now. Boy was I missing out!! Wow does it have flavor! I picked a few leaves, o.k. maybe 20 because they are small, and just put them in singularly into the mixture.  Such a good idea on my part I must say, hehe

Then I put filling in all of the tomatoes, stuffed them to the rims and a little above!

Then topped them each with a little mozzerella. Next time I am going to put about a Tbs of cottage cheese in each one.  Put each tomato in a cooking sheet, you can stuff them close together if you have a lot. More will actually help keep them from falling while cooking.

Set the heat to 400 degrees, and the timer to 30 minutes

I forgot to take a picture of them all once they were done, but this one was still in the pan (not for long).

We ate it with a chicken and spinach salad and some cottage cheese. It was delicious!! My only regret was that I didn't make more! This will definitely be repeated as a future dinner meal. I try personally to not eat a lot of cheese, but the cottage cheese was worth it this time, and my kids and husband got bigger chunks of chicken on their salad. Next time I want to add rice to the meal and put chunks of crispy bacon in the stuffing. Do any of you have any good ideas for stuffing tomatoes? I would love to learn about them!