PESTO MEATBALLS SERVED IN OVEN-ROASTED TOMATOES

Still obsessing with dried hortensias

I took a small break from blogging but now I am back. Food blogging must be one of the more demanding ways to blog, well it depends on how you do it, if you blog about what you eat for dinner it is slightly easier, if you create the food and recipes just to blog about it gets a bit more demanding. Whichever way you do, it still involves cooking the food and then do the styling to photograph it but it isn't over yet, you need to process and edit the photos and all this bores me sometimes and I need to take a break to get back the blogging mojo as my dear friend Kalyn calls it!
I wanted to remind you of the Show Us Your Most Treasured Cookbook event that is on and will finish this week, if you want to participate but haven't got around to it yet, don't worry, drop me a line and I will change the final dates. I have got some lovely entries but I would love to get to know more about your most treasured cookbooks and why you love them! Read here for the details.



When the pesto caught my eye while I was taking out the minced meat from the fridge and I got the inspiration to make these pesto meatballs, I also had a flashback to when I was a teenager and brought home a friend for dinner and my father made meatballs with coconut (I haven't heard from that friend ever since) - would these meatballs be as horrid as those, the nightmare of meatballs (FYI my father was a good cook but quite experimental at times)? They obviously wasn't as I am presenting them to you here today but I was a bit worried to tell the truth, maybe they would fall apart and just taste like perfumed mothballs. Instead I really liked them and served in oven-roasted tomatoes like here, they are a most perfect finger food indeed! But you can serve them like you want, the choice is yours.





PESTO MEATBALLS SERVED IN OVEN-ROASTED TOMATOES

500 g/1,1 lb minced meat
1 egg
4-5 tblsp freshly grated parmesan
3-4 tblsp pesto or more if you want + more
10-12 tomatoes
salt
extra-virgin olive oil

- Divide the tomatoes in two and empty them of seeds with the help of a spoon- Put them on an oven-proof form, sprinkle salt over and then drizzle olive oil on top. Bake in a pre-heated oven (150°C/300°F) until baked, it takes about 30-40 minutes.
- Mix meat, egg, parmesan, pesto and salt well and form quite small meatballs that you fry in a skillet in olive oil.
- Put a little pesto in each tomato half and then fill them up with small meatballs, if you want you can top with a little more pesto on the top like I did.