I meant to post this more than a week ago, but I got distracted by, well, laziness. Ha ha! Oops!

Any person who grows up in New Jersey is obligated to like tomatoes as soon as he or she has teeth. If there’s one thing - one good thing, I should say - that Jersey is famous for, it’s the tomatoes. Somehow, even despite the fact that my mother used to grow them in the back yard, I didn’t grow up liking tomatoes, which is probably why I was exiled at the age of twelve, forced to strike out as a nomad until I finished receiving my high school education from random hobos on trains, at which point I was allowed back in only after eating a dozen tomatoes while reciting Who’s On First set to Bruce Springsteen songs.

Making a good stuffed tomato can be difficult, because the tendency will be to end up with a mushy, sloppy mess that only barely resembles the dish’s constituent parts. I’ve taken quite a few tricks from Alton Brown’s stuffed tomato recipe that result in a firm, slightly crunchy tomato, and in fact plagiarized that recipe so blatantly that I actually feel a little guilty. So, thanks and kudos to Alton Brown.

I’m making a lot of tomatoes here. Remember that I usually cook enough food to keep myself fed for an entire week. Don’t feel bad if you can’t handle the magnitude.

So, start with eight large tomatoes. The ones that I had were about halfway between baseball and softball sized. You’ll also need 2 cups of finely chopped mushrooms; 2 finely diced medium yellow onions; a few finely diced cloves of garlic; about a pound of ground beef; five or six slices of bacon; some bleu cheese (I was using the leftover from the steak I had made a couple days before); grated mozzarella cheese; 1/2 cup of cheap whiskey (you can use 1 cup of red or white wine instead, if you want); and salt and pepper.

Start by microwaving the bacon on high until crunchy (that is, not just crispy). Every microwave is different, so the time this takes will vary. My microwave took about fifteen minutes. Just leave it running until you don’t hear any more popping. Don’t worry about it if you burn the bacon.

While the bacon cooks, slice off the top of and core each tomato. If you don’t have a really sharp knife, odds are good that the blade edge won’t catch on the tomato’s smooth, tough skin, and you’ll slip and cut yourself. To prevent this, use a bread knife.

As for coring, start by reaching a finger into each of the little chambers on the inside of the tomato and digging out all of the jelly inside. If there are any cuts on your finger that you aren’t yet aware of, this is where you’ll find out about them. That jelly is very acidic. I got a tiny cut on my left ring finger as I was cutting the tomatoes, and even that was torture. After you finish third-basing the tomato, use a grapefruit spoon to dig out the pink core, leaving only the red, outer wall of the tomato.

Sprinkle the inside of each tomato liberally with salt and place upside down on a rack in the sink to drain. The salt will draw the moisture out from the inside of the tomato meat. By getting all of that water out now, we prevent it from soaking into the stuffing later and making everything all sloppy and gross.

While the tomatoes drain, we can work on the stuffing. Saute the garlic and onions in olive oil on medium heat until the onions are softened and translucent. Add the mushrooms, salt them, and cook for a few more minutes until the liquid has boiled off. Add whiskey and cook until most of it is absorbed or evaporated. Few things smell as good as mushrooms cooking in whiskey. Finally, add the ground beef along with some salt and pepper, and cook until brown. Turn off the heat, crumble in the cooked bacon, and mix everything up.

Postscript to that: I felt like making the stuffing a little spicier this time, just for the hell of it. When I want to make something spicy, ground coriander seed (as opposed to coriander, which is actually known as cilantro in North America) is usually where I turn first. I find it to be nice and spicy, without causing flaming hell death like red pepper does, and I like the hint of citrus it has to it. It’s one of the main ingredients in many versions of curry, so if you don’t like curry, you won’t like coriander. In that case, just use a lot of pepper or maybe a diced jalapeno.

Preheat your broiler on high.

Stuff each tomato, and then top each one with a layer mozzarella, followed by a layer of bleu cheese. When stuffing the tomatoes, make sure to leave a little room at the top so you can add the cheese without it falling over the sides of the tomatoes. Also, don’t go too crazy with the bleu cheese, because bleu has a tendency to overpower everything.

Eat the leftover stuffing. It’s sooooo good.

Place the stuffed tomatoes on a baking sheet and place in the broiler for a few minutes, until the cheese is melted and golden brown. It should only take two or three minutes. Leave the door cracked open so you can keep an eye on the cheese, and so the broiler doesn’t turn off.

Let them sit for a few minutes so the heat in the stuffing and cheese can transfer into the tomatoes a little more evenly. They shouldn’t be too hot to touch, so you could probably get away with serving them as really messy finger food if you want. I’m sure it will be just fine so long as you’re outside or you have a dog.

Ingredients:
8 large tomatoes, cored and seeded
2 cups finely chopped mushrooms
2 medium yellow onions, finely diced
3 or 4 cloves garlic, finely diced
1 lb. ground beef
5 or 6 slices bacon
Grated mozarella cheese
Grated bleu cheese
1/2 cup whiskey (or 1 cup red or white wine)
1 tbsp. olive oil
Salt and pepper

Microwave bacon on high until crunchy.

Sprinkle the insides of the tomatoes with salt and place upside down to drain.

Saute garlic and onion in olive oil over medium heat until translucent. Add mushrooms and cook for five minutes. Add whiskey and cook until most of the liquid is gone. Add ground beef and cook until brown. Turn off the heat, crumble in the cooked bacon, and mix everything up.

Preheat broiler on high. Stuff the tomatoes, and then sprinkle with grated mozzarella, followed by bleu cheese.

Place tomatoes on a baking sheet and place under the broiler for 3 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and golden brown.

Background music was Led Zeppelin III and Foo Fighters’ In Your Honor, Disc 1. Tomatoes like to rock out, you see.

Microwavability: 3/5 - The flavor won’t be affected by the microwave at all, but there’s a good chance that the tomato will get squishy and leak juice everywhere, no matter how well you drained them before. I don’t mind it, personally, but if you do, just eat some rice with it to soak up the mess.

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This first entry in Watch Ray Cook A Thing is an original. This was its maiden voyage, in fact. I call it Bleu Cheese and Tomato Steak, because it’s a steak with tomatoes and bleu cheese on it.

Bleu cheese is tricky to work with, because it is positively mighty when it comes to flavor. It’s easy to wind up with something that tastes like bleu cheese with some other unrecognizable miscellany under it. Awesome cheese, but treat it with respect, like you would with a Japanese sword.

Start out with a steak. Yep. Sirloin is probably the way to go; I imagine flank would work, too. I wouldn’t waste a filet on this, though. It’s too mild, so you wouldn’t taste it through the cheese. Sizewise, whatever you like. Doesn’t even have to be just one, either, in fact. As a general rule, for every additional steak that you want to make, you’re going to need another steak.

I used a 1″ thick, 15 ounce sirloin. It was a little unevenly cut, and it had a big ligament near one end, but it served the purpose.

Salt and pepper both sides of your steak. You won’t need much salt, because bleu cheese is a pretty salty cheese. On the other hand, you might want to use more pepper than usual, just because of how overpowering bleu can be.

Slice up a tomato into about 3/4 to 1 centimeter slices. You’ll need enough slices to cover the steak.

Same thing with the bleu cheese, only thinner slices. I found a nice, big wedge of bleu in the produce section at the supermarket. I had enough cheese to cover the steak, with plenty left over for the stuffed tomatoes that I made the next day (today, actually - I made this steak yesterday).

I use a Weber Go-Anywhere charcoal grill. It was all of $40, and I’m quite fond of it. I’ll probably get the propane version eventually, but I’m really not in any hurry.

Anyway, build your fire, or turn your dials and press your button if you’re on propane. You’ll want it screaming hot on one side (you shouldn’t be able to hold your hand over it for more than a second or two), and just off on the other. I figure this is simply classic steak etiquette: you sear it mercilessly for a couple minutes on the hot side, and then you move it over to the cool side and put the cover on so it can cook through.

Steak on the hot side. Flip it once a minute until evenly seared. Flameups are good. When it’s nice and brown, move it over to the cool side. I think this took five or six minutes for me, because my fire didn’t come out as hot as I wanted it to. It should only take about four minutes.

Put the tomato slices on top, and then the bleu cheese slices. Put the cover on the grill, and let it cook for about 7 - 10 minutes for a medium-rare steak (it was fifteen for me this time, again because of the cool fire). The internal temperature should be about 130°F.

Remove the steak from the grill and wrap it in aluminum foil for 5 minutes. Try not to let the foil touch the cheese, or it might stick. Again, wrapping a steak up after grilling is common etiquette. Be kind to your steak.

As expected, my steak was a little unevenly cooked because of the uneven thickness, but it wasn’t cooked past medium-well anywhere, which actually surprised me. The thick portions were right about medium, so maybe my fire was hotter than I had thought.

I ate it with a Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA - when you gotta have hops, you can’t beat a good double IPA.

Ingredients:
16 oz. sirloin or flank steak
1 tomato, sliced into 1 cm slices, enough to cover the steak
Bleu cheese, sliced thin, enough to cover the steak
Salt and pepper to taste

Build a hot fire, with half of the grill hot, and the other cool. Sear both sides of the steak for four minutes on the hot side (flip once every minute), and then move to the cool side.

Place tomato slices on the steak, followed by cheese slices. Cover the grill, and let cook until the interior temperature is 130°F, about 8 - 10 minutes for medium-rare.

Remove from heat and cover with foil for 5 minutes.

Background music was Game 4 of the Carolina-New Jersey series, in which my Devils somehow managed to win 5-1 and prevent a sweep. I wasn’t extremely surprised when they lost Game 5 a few minutes ago.

Microwavability: 2/5 - It’s perfectly legal to microwave it if you absolutely cannot avoid leftovers, but steak just does not nuke well. Make only what you can eat.

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You know, I’ve been Purging for years over here, and in that time, I’ve never really shared one of my biggest passions: I love to cook. It’s probably the only thing that I’d rather do instead of play video games. The only hobby, I should say.

So, I have decided to start Purging about the things that I cook. Most things that I make are my own interpretation of an already common recipe, but I do come up with ideas of my own from time to time.

The way these recipes are going to work is like so: I’ll first provide an informal account of what I did as I was working. This will be mostly imprecise and will probably anger the engineers in the audience. To make up for that, after the play-by-play, I’ll write out a more traditional recipe writeup, all bland and numerical.

The final section of the recipe will be the dish’s microwavability. As a bachelor, I usually cook a huge amount of food on Sunday evening and eat the leftovers over the course of the week. How good a dish still is after being microwaved is extremely important to me. If it is also to you, then you’re welcome. If not, then I’m sorry. I hope we can still be friends.

Microwavability is on a scale of 1 - 5. A dish rated 1 will be ruined in the microwave; try microwaving some pizza crust for an example of this. My sister also suggested babies. Dishes rated a 5 are indistinguishable from the original, and are frequently better, after being reheated in a microwave; tomato sauce dishes are a great example of this. I don’t know why, but lasagna is always better as a nuked leftover.

After that, I’ll tell you what I was listening to as I worked, just for kicks.

Anyway, the first recipe is coming up in the next entry. See you real soon!

That was cheesy.

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