Tomato Recipes with Eastern European Flair

This recipe for tomato-cheese tart uses a filo-dough crust instead of a pie-dough crust as in the recipe for Tomato Tart (below).

Simple ingredients go into this simple cream of tomato soup recipe made to look stunning with a puff pastry top. It's best if the flavors are allowed to develop overnight before baking it with the puff pastry top, so plan accordingly.

This tomato tart recipe is versatile in that the cheese base can be varied to suit one's Eastern European tastes. Dry curd cheese, also known as farmer's cheese or baker's cheese, Bulgarian feta or ricotta cheese can all be used in combination or alone. The fresh herbs can range from dill to thyme to oregano.

This chopped vegetable salad makes good use of garden-fresh green beans and tomatoes -- two vegetables most Eastern European cooks have in their backyards. It's bathed in a creamy buttermilk dressing -- another decidedly Eastern European favorite. Really refreshing!

This Bulgarian watermelon salad recipes features tomatoes, red onion and pine nuts along with feta cheese, and is great as an appetizer salad or main course vegetarian offering.

This Hungarian fresh tomato soup recipe (paradicsomleves) can be served hot or cold and fleshed out with an addition of small pasta and served with crusty bread. Dollop the soup with sour cream, if you like. This is a great way to use an abundance of garden tomatoes and the riper they are, the better! That means overripe tomatoes are just fine.

Hungarian lecso (LEH-choh) is a vegetable stew that combines three of Hungary's favorite ingredients -- peppers, tomatoes and paprika. Lecso can be served variously as a vegetable side dish, appetizer or the main meal itself. It's similar to Serbian djuvece (below) and Russian letcho.

This recipe for Serbian vegetable casserole or djuvece uses summer's bounty -- zucchini, tomatoes, carrots, celery, potatoes, onions and green pepper. The dish is started on the stovetop and then mixed with rice and baked. It makes a great Lenten dish or vegetarian main course.

This is one of those versatile kitchen-sink types of soups. I concocted this based on what I had in my rerigerator and freezer at the time. Let your imagination be your guide. I like to sweat my vegetables and the barley in a little butter or oil to slightly caramelize the veggies and coat the grain. It really makes a difference. This is a good candidate for a slow cooker.

This tomato butter recipe is simple to prepare and makes good use of a bumper crop of tomatoes -- ripe or green! It calls for only two ingredients -- tomatoes and sugar. That's it! This is a great project for the kids and the recipe easily can be doubled or tripled.See All About Fruit Butters.