Roasted Grape Tomatoes

It’s crazy. Crazy how much I love these little wonders. Crazy how easy they are to make. The 10 gallons of grape tomatoes sitting in my kitchen this morning is crazy too, but I will worry about them later.

Often, recipes for roasted or sun dried tomatoes call for Romas or a similar paste type. This will work very nicely with those though it will take longer. We love grape tomatoes and always plant more than we should. They are surprisingly meaty and rich, make lovely sauce and most of the ones we don’t eat or give away end up that way. This is yet another way to bring out their enchanting characteristics and the end result is very versatile, useful for everything from starters, to salad to a pasta sauce.

I just have to pause a moment here to mourn the temporary demise of my D70. {sob} I am back to my little Nikon Coolpix 5600 until I get the big guy back from the camera hospital, so you might notice a bit of a loss of quality in the photos here.

Start, of course, by washing the tomatoes. Lay them on a towel and blot as much moisture as possible, since any water on them will slow down the roasting.Cut each one in half and lay cut side up on a baking tray. I use parchment paper for this because I am lazy and hate scrubbing pans.Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle over kosher salt and some freshly ground pepper.The first couple batches I did this summer I left plain, but this time I wanted to experiment with some additional flavor. These are definitely what you would call local ingredients. The herbs are from the pots in my front flower beds and we get the garlic from a guy Larry works with. He grows it with his Dad and it is the best garlic I have ever had. The herbs I used are, from left to right, rosemary, oregano, thyme and parsley. I wasn’t sure of the best way to do this, so on one tray, I put the herbs and garlic with the tomatoes from the start and on the second tray, I chopped things a bit finer and waited until the last hour or so to scatter them over the tomatoes.I start them out at about 375 degrees for about 20 minutes, just to get things going well. Cut back the heat to about 250 and roast for as long as you like. I did these for about 4 hours. In that amount of time, you’ll end up with tomatoes that have a rich flavor but still have quite a lot of juiciness inside. You can let them go longer if you want them to be more like the sun dried tomatoes you buy in the store. As for my experiment with the herbs and garlic, the result was mixed. The garlic got rather hard, though sticking the slivers down into the tomatoes for a couple minutes took care of that. On the other hand, an hour wasn’t really long enough for the second tray to deepen the flavor as much I thought it would. I think next time, I would chop everything up and add them about 90 minutes before the end of the cooking time. As mentioned, I have used them along with some shrimp and sautéed mushrooms over pasta, or chopped into a tossed salad. Here though, I just toasted some french bread that I brushed lightly with olive oil, topped with a room temperature tomato half and a few strands of pecorino romano. Heaven on a plate!