This recipe began as most of mine do, inspired by a need to use and/or “enhance” an ingredient. In this case, Kate was jonesing for tofu and we had a couple tomatoes that were pretty mediocre but had tempted me (foolish!) on one of my rare visits to the supermarket’s produce aisle. I’ll skip to the happy ending – tas-tee! It was a focal point and primary protein source of this meal but I think it’d work well as a “finger food” if entertaining (it wouldn’t have been much harder to double the recipe). They’re stuffed-“ish” because really they’re actually topped and not stuffed, but if people can pile stuff on a portabella mushroom and call it “stuffed” then I can use the term here. Total cooking time was about an hour from beginning to end.

I generally like cooked cornmeal as a primary pancake ingredient and here is a recently-tweaked version of my recipe.

This recipe, aside from being REALLY tasty and providing serious leftovers, took only about 40 minutes from start to finish, and most of it was waiting time that enabled me to simultaneously make an elaborate salad and do some dishes. It requires a hand blender (blender-on-a-stick, whatever you call it). Without that, you’d need to let it cool a bit before throwing it in a normal blender, which would probably add 10 minutes or so to the process.