Summer Food Love - Low Carb Stuffed Baked Tomatoes

As mentioned before, this is the summer of foodie experiments, and yummy baskets of produce, and all sorts of good things.  We picked up our second Bountiful Basket on Saturday and were well restocked on all our produce needs--fresh plums, pineapple, romaine, cauliflower, and more.

However, we still had 3 tomatoes leftover from last basket (I had already had some in the fridge when basket #1 came in).  We got 5 more tomatoes.  And our next door neighbor ordered a basket too, and told me to keep her tomatoes because they don't care for them.  She had 6.  That means we had 14 tomatoes in our house and that's a whole lot of tomatoes.

So I thought about it for awhile and realized that there was no reason I couldn't make a nice baked tomato.  With a bit of experimenting, I ended up with stuffed baked tomatoes, and afterwards, we realized they are low carb too.

It's very hard to take a picture inside the oven!

Stuffed Baked Tomatoes
1 lb ground pork
Minced garlic
Italian Seasoning
Shredded cheese
Whole tomatoes

• Saute the ground pork with a few teaspoons of minced garlic
• Drain excess fat, season with a few teaspoons of Italian seasoning
• Cut the tomatoes in half and scoop out the inside pulp and seed (I saved mine to add to tomato soup)
• Fill each tomato with enough of the meat mixture to reach the top and place on a baking sheet
• Bake at 350 for about 10 minutes or until the skin starts to wrinkle
• Remove from oven, sprinkle cheese on top, and bake for an extra 2-3 minutes until the cheese melts

Now I did overshoot the amount of ground pork, so I made sausage stuffed muffins with the rest.  Just add the extra ground pork to corn muffin batter, add cheese, and bake as muffins.