Oven Roasted Tomatoes

Similar to bananas, tomatoes are another thing that I find difficult to eat all of before they go bad. The last time I bought a little case of cherry tomatoes I decided that I was not going to let any go to waste! I ate them on everything, purposely making a lot of salads, sandwiches and even scrambling them into my eggs but I was still left with a handful of slightly wrinkly cherry tomatoes...

Then I had an idea.

Oven-roast the tomatoes! Sun dried tomatoes are delicious and make any normal salad or sandwich seem fancy while adding some extra flavor and seasoning. They also can be frozen and keep awhile. Since it was winter I wasn't going to try anything crazy involving actually sun-drying the tomatoes so I earched for how to oven roast the tomatoes. After adapting the instructions to suit my toaster over I went to work and was not disappointed with the results :)

To anyone looking for something to do with tomatoes that aren't going to be very good much longer, I'd suggest oven roasting them. And to anyone who doesn't have an oven, keep reading and see how it can be done in a toaster oven!

First, gather your ingredients. I use cherry/grape tomatoes since I just have a toaster oven but I believe roma are the common roasting tomato. You'll want some olive oil, seasonings (I like Italian seasoning and garlic salt), and a muffin pan (for me that's what fits in my toaster oven if you had a tiny cookie sheet or baking pan that fits use that! BUT don't use aluminum foil!! Usually when I'm baking something here I just use a sheet of aluminum foil and roll the edges a bit but the acid from the tomatoes will have some sort of chemical reaction to the aluminum and bad things will happen.) 

Pour a little olive oil into each muffin tin cup. Then swirl it around to coat the bottoms.

Wash your tomatoes, then cut them in half. For the muffin pans you can fit 3-4 halves in each cup. I used a 6-cup pan so I cut up 11 tomatoes but do what you feel.

Put the tomato halves into the tins, swirl then around to coat them with the oil and sprinkle with the seasonings. On the far left I used just Italian seasoning and on the far right I only used garlic salt then in the middle column I mixed them. 

Pop them in the toaster oven for about 20 minutes at about 375* If you were using a real over you'd want to roast them at 450* but as I learned the hard way that will make a toaster oven spit oil everywhere and smoke up and probably be a possible fire hazard... So keep an eye on the temperature and attitude of your toaster oven :) The higher temp the better for the drying process but if you can't have it very high, bake them a little longer. 

The timing is pretty approximate but once the tomatoes are pretty dried out you can remove them from the oven. 

Let them cool a couple minutes then move them around with a fork or spoon to keep them from sticking to the pan. Once totally cooled they can be bagged or packed up and eaten or frozen or refrigerated. Supposedly they'll last 6 months in the freezer and 3-4 days in the refrigerator. I have not tested this but one of the sites I was originally learning from gives those times.