Of all the vegetables that you can fill with rice, meat or whatever idea you have like groats, the best, in my opinion, vegetable to use as a shell is the humble onion!
Indeed, the onions are the vegetable that gives ‘body’ to cooking. Without the onion, the sauce doesn’t thicken, the legumes are not sweet, and the Greek salad is poor. Half of my recipes begin with the phrase, ‘sauté the onions in olive oil’!
So, following my grandmother’s history, I have decided to make this recipe:
Ingredients: 6 tomatoes which I stuffed and put on my baking tray for the flavour, 8 big white onions for the filling, 10 tbsp or rice, 4 spring onions chopped, 1 leek chopped, ½ bunch of parsley finely chopped, ½ bunch of spearmint finely chopped, 1 tbsp of tomato paste, 0.5ltr of vegetables broth, 1 eggplant chopped in pieces, 1 zucchini chopped in pieces, 10 tbsp of olive oil (I now count them!), salt and pepper, a handful of raisins, a handful of pine cone seeds
This food needs some preparation..You clean and cut the big onions vertically from the one side so that each leaf can be separated from the one inside and so on. Put them in a deep pot for 15 minutes and boil them in water. Strain them and keep 0.5ltr of water just in case you need it in substitution of broth. Let them cool down until you can safely separate the leaves and hold them to fill them in.
On to your tomatoes: Cut them on top (try to keep the one side attached to the body) and empty them from their insides. Keep the insides and put them in a blender to make a smooth juice. In your baking tray put your six tomatoes upside down so that they omit all their juices.
In a pan, in medium fire, put three tbsp of olive oil and sauté the spring onions and the leek. Put the eggplant and the zucchini and toss. Add half the tomato juice, the tomato paste and half the broth. Add the rice, the parsley, the spearmint. In the end turn off the fire and add the raisins and the pinecone seeds.
I have put my tomatoes on the edges so that their juices are spread everywhere and the onions in the middle. Fill in every tomato up to 4/5 of it and close it with its cap. Take every onion leaf and fill it in with 1-1.5 tbsp of the rice and vegetables mixture. You will see that if you put the mixture in the middle of the onion leaf, then this has a tendency to close as it is designed that way: it closes and hugs the filling!
I filled in approximately 30 onion leaves. I used mainly the outside bigger leaves. I spread some of the onions’ residuals all around my tray for extra flavour. Also, I spread the remaining tomato juice, broth and olive oil all over my food.
I baked in 180C for 1hr and 15min, half the hour covered with aluminium foil. The food is ready once the rice is ready. Also throughout baking, check that the food is juicy.
I escorted it with yogurt. A better idea is feta cheese! Enjoy!
