Recipe - Tomato Dumplings
This is what my mom would call "a real old-timey dish" - essentially, it's stewed tomatoes with drop biscuits cooked atop the simmering vegetables (sorry, I simply cannot bring myself to call those dumplings!). I remember my grandmother making a very similar dish frequently, and it's funny how, in our family growing up, a person either loved stewed tomatoes or despised them, and we were just about evenly split on the matter.
I did make one mistake (I always make at least one mistake when I'm cooking something): since this is a recipe for stewed tomatoes, I'd meant to leave the tomatoes barely chopped, but I got distracted and kept chopping and chopping and chopping some more, until I ended up with more of a chunky sauce than proper stewed tomatoes.
That's why, if you look at that one pic, you'll see a pan-seared chicken breast in there. I didn't include that as part of the recipe, as I had to improvise that at the last minute. That's an interesting thing in itself, though, because I seared it using a technique I picked up from America's Test Kitchen - I baked boneless, skinless breasts until nearly done, then painted them with a butter-flour-cornstarch-pepper slurry, and browned them off in a hot skillet. Ah...a recipe for another challenge, perhaps.
The drop biscuits, because they're simmered in a covered pot and not baked, are wonderfully light and fluffy from outside to inside. When you remove the lid, you'll likely think they're not done, because they'll look shiny and wet on the outside, but if you cook them the required time and at the required temp, and don't take the lid off to peek, they'll be just fine.
Bad lighting doesn't do it justice.
