Slow Roasted Tomatoes

This weekend I cooked a lot!  I had a bunch of stuff in my fridge that I needed to cook before it went off and so I’ll be posting a few recipes here over the next few days: Slow Roasted Tomatoes, Roasted Garlic and Cauliflower Soup, Zucchini Cupcakes with Lemon Cream Cheese Frosting, and a Mexican Omelette.  It was a lot of fun.  As Scotty and I are still fighting our colds, we didn’t do much socializing with other people but enjoyed a weekend spent almost entirely together – aided by the fact that I forgot about my cellphone and didn’t get any of the messages from friends wanting to get together.

On Saturday morning I made one of my favorite ingredients – Slow Roasted Tomatoes.  I had begun making these last summer and, WOW, they are delicious.  We’re talking HUGE flavor.  They’re great in nearly everything – salads, sandwiches (my all-time favorite sandwich recipe will also be posted in the next few days), omelette, pasta, or just plain eating.  And they’re basically the easiest thing to make.

Slow Roasted Tomatoes

•  grape or cherry tomatoes – I like using different colors, yellow, orange, red
• several unpeeled cloves of garlic
• olive oil
• Italian Seasoning
• salt

Preheat oven to 225° F. Slice tomatoes in half from top to bottom.  Arrange on a cookie sheet (you’ll notice in my pictures I’m using a roasting pan – but that’s because I don’t have a cookie sheet big enough, but you can use either).  Scatter the unpeeled cloves of garlic amidst the tomatoes.  

Drizzle very lightly with olive oil – you really do not need a lot.  

Once the tomatoes have been very lightly drizzled, give each clove of garlic a good soaking.  This is important if you’re going to use the garlic once the tomatoes are done – something I highly recommend.  If you make sure the garlic is well-coated in olive oil it will roast beautifully and you’ll be left with delicious, soft, mellow, nutty tasting cloves to add to soups, dressings, or just to spread straight onto some good French bread.  If the garlic isn’t well coated, it burns and turns into a little black rock that is good for nothing more than to be thrown away.  Next, sprinkle the tomatoes with some crushed Italian herbs – I used a generic Italian Herb Mix but these are really good with rosemary, oregano (actually my favorite), herbs de Provence, whatever you like.  Next sprinkle very lightly with salt.  You really don’t need a lot here because the flavor is so concentrated so go easy.

Put tray in oven and cook for 2½ – 3 hours.  Tomatoes are done when they’re a bit shriveled but still juicy at the centers.  

Go ahead, eat one.  Wow?!?  I have a couple of recipes to use these in but in the mean time, enjoy them on their own.  To store, just place in a glass storage container along with the garlic cloves, drizzle with olive oil to preserve and refrigerate.  I would say these probably keep for a week, but I wouldn’t know.  They don’t last that long around here!