First taste of summer

It's technically a summer dish, but the first round zucchinis appeared at our local market last week, and I couldn't pass them up. No big round tomatoes yet, though, so we just bought some small ones and added them to the stuffing. Usually, we'd carve those out as well and the juice and flesh would go into the stuffing.

It takes a while to cook, two solid hours. But it's worth it. It gets better with reheating, so my advice is to cook it in advance and reheat it. It freezes well - just reheat it in the oven for dinner !

Légumes farcis - stuffed vegetables

2 bell peppers

2 eggplants

5 round zucchinis (you can make do with long zucchinis, but they aren't as easy to stuff)

8 tomatoes

10oz ground beef

10oz ground pork

2 cups hacked stale bread

herbes de Provence (savory, thyme, sage, basil, rosemary)

oat milk

ground black pepper

Place the stale bread in a bowl and pour some oat milk over it. Stir from time to time until all the bread is soft.

Wash the vegetables. Cut off the top off the zucchinis and carve out their insides with a teaspoon (keep the flesh, don't discard it). Cut the peppers and eggplants in half, cut off and discard the stem. Carve out the insides of the eggplants as well. Place the hollowed out vegetables in a large pan with relatively high edges, with a dash of olive oil at the bottom of the pan.

Now take the flesh of the zucchinis and eggplants, dice it and add it to the bread mixture. Add the diced tomatoes, herbs, a good dose of black pepper. Add the meat little by little, kneading small bits of meat into the stuffing - the meat tends to stick to itself and not mix well with the remaining ingredients, so take your time to separate it into smaller bits and mix well. I haven't found a better instrument to do that than my two bare hands :)

Stuff the vegetables, replacing the "lid" on the zucchinis (and tomatoes, if you've found tomatoes big enough to use that way) after wards. If you have too much stuffing, either make little domes over the vegetables, or, if you really have too much, stuff the spaces between the vegetables.

Add a little water to the pan, just enough to barely cover the bottom of the pan. Bake in the oven, 390°F, for two solid hours, or even a little more. Serve hot with rice.

I don't have a set quantity of vegetables I put into the dish, I wash and prepare just enough so that the pan is full. You can pretty much adapt the recipe to other vegetables - onions, potatoes, small pumpkins in winter.