Last tomatoes: roast 'em

I was going to make tomato jam, but the idea of peeling all of the tomatoes that I bought from Erin Smith at the Hopkins Farmers Market on Saturday stopped me in my tracks. Fortunately, I had a better idea, and I roasted them in two large batches, the easiest thing in the world. Think duxelles (minced mushrooms cooked down to their essence), and know with a tiny amount of work, you will have the essence of tomatoes in a dish.

Chopped with garlic and chili

Roasted with a blackened chili

My first introduction to roasted tomatoes came from the late-but-never forgotten Laurie Colwin, who wrote rhapsodically about them in More Home Cooking. I use winter tomatoes and make it often.

Roasting large batches of tomatoes can take 3 hours. Settle in near your oven so that you can stir every 30 minutes or so. You'll know when your batch is finished when the tomatoes have gone from bright and juicy to dark and jammy.

Easy Peasy Roasted Tomatoes

Fresh tomatoes: chop up as many has you have
Fresh Garlic: 3-5 fat cloves
Dried Chili: As much or as little as you like
Fresh Ground Pepper: 1-2 tsp
Optional: 1/2 finely chopped onion (which I forgot yesterday)
Optional: any amount of thin sliced fresh sweet or hot peppers
1/4 cup oil (I like canola; olive oil lovers, have at it!)

Oven temp: I have a convection oven option, and I started at 450 for about 45 minutes, and then reduced the heat to 325.)

1. Pre-heat the oil in your largest heavy shallow roasting pan. Unless you want to clean your oven, do not use a rimmed baking sheet. 
2. Add the tomatoes, garlic, chili and (optional) onion and pepper.
3. Roast for three hours, stirring every 30 minutes.

If you can resist eating this all at once, it will freeze nicely for 3 months.

The Sacred Literature of Fresh Tomato Deliciousness: Laurie Colwin

If you do not already own Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, stop now and run to a bookstore, or do a quick-as-a-wink click to Amazon, Jessica's Biscuit or your Kindle. Her essays are priceless; her thoughts on tomatoes and the recipes in the "Tomatoes" chapter of More Home Cooking, should be required reading and eating.

If it were not a copyright infringement, I would reproduce the chapter in its entirety -- but I know better.  She begins:

There are very few things that mankind cannot live without. For centuries, we survived without compact discs, automated bank tellers, iceberg lettuce, and bubble gum-flavored toothpaste, to say nothing of the internal combustion engine.

But life as we know it would be unimaginable without the tomato...

And later one of my favorite sentences in tomato literature: "In summer, the idea is to eat as many tomatoes as you can and enjoy the luxury of getting sick of them."

Two of my three favorite recipes in this chapter are directions for a fresh tomato sandwich slathered with mayo and celery seeds, and for a tomato pie with a double-biscuit pie dough and copious amounts of Cheddar. That she details its origin -- from a friend who found it in a school cookbook and who changed it to make it her own -- reflects her devotion to story telling.  In addition to writing about food,  she was a novelist, and I am not surprised to believe that the animating spirit of all of  her food writing was "What is a recipe without a story?"

In the spirit of story-telling, she gives basic-but-not-definitive instructions for slow-roasted tomatoes, one of the best foods on earth.  Through some delightful trial and no inedible error, I devised a recipe that works in the dead of winter with fresh and canned Roma tomatoes.  If you can bear to turn on your oven for three hours in the summer, you will be rewarded with the Concentrated Tomato Deliciousness that comes of baking chopped fresh tomatoes, some hot peppers, garlic, and olive oil.

Will you share it? I dare not predict.