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.

Fall Is In The Air

Can you feel Fall in the air? Maybe it's just me but there's something thrilling about the start of a new season. And having only experienced summer so far in New York I'm excited to be here for another season.

I am a very sensory person and perhaps it's my creativity or my being whimsical, but I have strong connections between the senses and pretty much anything (as you may have noticed from my Rainy Day Music post). Or maybe everyone is that way, I'm not sure because I'm not everyone :)

Walking back from lunch one day last week, I commented on how "Fall" the day felt. Pointing out the cooler temperatures, light breeze, the golden sheen to the sunlight, and how it even smelled like Fall. Or at least what I guess Fall smells like in the city, not quite the same as Fall in West Liberty...

The results of some teamwork pumpkin carving last fall

Anyways, there are plenty of things associated with Autumn in most peoples' minds: pumpkin flavored everything, desserts consisting of apple and cinnamon, leaf piles, hay rides, going back to school (so strange for me not to be doing this year) breaking out the sweatshirts and jeans, Halloween, apple cider, pumpkin carving... And football.

Football has always been a big part of fall for me, which I didn't really think about until I went to college. Friday nights without a football game just seemed empty and sad. And it's not that I'm even a huge football fan. I understand it well enough to get by but there's no way I could have an in-depth conversation about it, or even watch an entire game intently. Nonetheless, I had been going to football games most of my life, thanks to my dad being a high school football coach for most of my life. Then, in high school, I was in marching band and the flag corps so I was at every game.

Senior year flag corps 2010

Working at Hill Country on Saturdays reminds me of being at home for college football games. Of course it's the Texans or Longhorns or Cowboys playing instead of the Buckeyes, and it's multiple people, drinking and cheering, rather than just my dad, who still probably cheers and hollers about as loud as any of the guys at the restaurant. It's amazing how these little things, just being around guys excited for the sport, yelling for and at their team, can take you to a whole different place while reminding you of the time (season) you're in.

Overall I guess the point of this post is to point out how certain things will always be associated with certain times. In this case there are many, many, many elements that prove to me that it is indeed Fall, some are sensory--golden light, chill in the breeze, scent of apple-cinnamon--while others are memory or tradition-based--carving pumpkins, watching football. I never really thought of football as a big part of my life and yet, mostly thanks to my dad, it was a huge part of my life as well as an identifier of Autumn for me.