party food on a stick: cherry tomatoes, mozzarella and pesto

cherry tomatoes stuffed with pesto and mozzarella (without their sticks!)

This is ideal party food - intensely savoury, yet slightly sweet, mouthfuls of deliciousness. On a stick. Use the sweetest cherry tomatoes or baby plum tomatoes that you find. I would say make your own pesto, but failing that, buy pesto from a deli or from the deli counter of your supermarket. (Please don't use that stuff in jars that has a strangely subdued colour and a distinct flavour of rancid cheese). So make your own, it's a revelation.

 find when I serve these at parties, people will munch their way through a couple of these sticks, while chatting away and slurping at wine. After a few of these, people find themselves saying "Damn, these are good." There's always a slight element of surprise that something so simple can be so pleasurable!

Skill level: Easy although a bit fiddly

ingredients:

cherry or baby plum tomatoes

fresh mozzarella

fresh pesto

cocktail sticks

directions:

1. Slice the top of each tomato. Scoop out the seeds in both the main body of the tomato and it's "lid". Make sure that you don't pierce the skin of the tomato. (I tend to loosen the seeds with a sharp knife and then scoop the rest out using a teaspoon).
2. Turn the tomatoes upside down to drain of any juice. I tend to arrange them with their "lids", so that each "lid" will fit later!
3. Drain the mozzarella and chop into pea-sized pieces.
4. To assemble, drip a small dollop of pesto into the cavity of the tomato.
5. Gently stuff in a piece of mozzarella.
6. Take the tomato "lid" and place on top.
7. Holding this together, skewer through the "lid" with a cocktail stick.
8. Serve at room temperature.

The photo at the top of this blog is, I hope, an example of my improved photography. Well, I can only hope. Unfortunately, I forget to photograph the tomatoes with their lids impaled by cocktail sticks. By the time I remembered, we had eaten the lot. Oh well.

But here is my original photograph, with tomatoes on sticks, on a very hot summer's evening . . .

stuffed cherry tomatoes on sticks!