Laptop Lunches #114

Carrots, sugar snap peas, and orange grape tomatoes with spinach yogurt dip; Caesar salad stuffed eggs (recipe below); strawberries, orange slices, kiwi slices, and champagne grapes; and crab stuffed tomatoes on a bed of romaine (recipe below).

Before I get to the recipes, I want to share my excitement with you at finding these tiny square silicone cups:

They're so perfect for tight corners! I just wish they came in other colors. It seems like all of Freshware's baking cups are in red and black. Oh, well.

On to the recipes!

Caesar Salad Stuffed Eggs (adapted from Rachel Ray's recipe)
Serves 1

1 hard boiled egg, peeled
1/8 teaspoon anchovy paste
Dash of garlic salt
Ground black pepper to taste
1 teaspoon grated parmesan cheese, plus extra for garnish
A few drops of Worcestershire sauce
A splash of lemon juice (about 1/8 teaspoon or a little less)
Enough light mayo to bind (a little less than a tablespoon, usually)
A bit of chopped romaine lettuce (see illustration below)

Slice egg in half lengthwise. Empty yolks into a small bowl and mash together wtih anchovy paste, garlic salt, and black pepper. Mix in cheese, Worcestershire, lemon juice, and mayo. Stir in lettuce. It's hard for me to explain how much lettuce, so I'll just show you here:

Stuff into eggs. Sprinkle a bit of parmesan and some finely chopped lettuce leaf for garnish. Viola!

You'll swear you're eating Caesar salad in egg form.

Finally, the stuffed tomatoes.

Crab Stuffed Tomatoes
Serves 1

2 small tomatoes (not cherry tomatoes--just regular tomatoes but quite small)
1/4 cup shred-style imitation crab meat (this will pack down to about 1/8 of a cup when mixed)
Enough light mayo to bind (about 1 tablespoon)
Salt and pepper to taste

Cut off tops of tomatoes carefully with a small serrated knife (I use a steak knife). Gently cut out the core of the tomato. Scoop out the core and the seeds with a demitasse spoon. I tried to photograph this but my camera gave me fits trying to take a picture of the unstufffed tomato--this is the best I've got:

Here we have pictured a tomato with the top removed as well as a hollowed out one.

Mix remaining ingredients well in a small bowl. For some reason that photographed beautifully, although I'm not sure it needed illustration:

Pack mixture into tomatoes.

Now, if you have tomatoes that want to roll around all over the place and not sit up like good little tomatoes, you can do one of two things. One, you can carefully slice a tiny bit off the bottom so they sit flat, or two, you can stick them on a bed of lettuce wedged into a small container. Do whatever makes you happy.



That made me happy.

You can use this technique to stuff a variety of fillings into tomato cups--egg salad, tuna salad, ham salad pimento cheese, spinach yogurt dip, etc. As I currently have tomato plants producing oddly-sized smallish tomatoes, you'll probably see this sort of thing more than once from me in the coming weeks.

If there is a lesson for today, it is this: Having tiny spoons on hand is a big help. Befriend the tiny spoons!

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