Roasted Tomatoes Recipe

Ready to get popped into the oven.

 This is an easy recipe which is mostly hands off and comes in so handy when you need tomatoes in the winter. Roasted tomatoes make a good pasta sauce, you can use them in soups, reheat and eat as a veg side, and whatever else you can think of.  

Nice and soft which means they are done.

They freeze wonderfully so making a big batch works well. You can use whatever tomatoes look the best just adjust cooking time for size and amount.  I like to use Roma tomatoes for this but this time I used a slicing tomato. I do not weigh out my tomatoes I just guess.

Ready for the freezer

Roasted Tomatoes

2 pounds or so of tomatoes, quartered if large.

1-2 tablespoons olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Fresh or dried herbs such as thyme or rosemary.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Quarter large tomatoes, romas you can leave whole.  Toss with oil, salt, and pepper in a 13x9 pan. Put in oven and roast for 15 minutes.  Take out and stir tomatoes and roast for another 15 minutes. Check and see if they look soft.  If they look soft they are done, if still hard or firm looking roast for another 10 minutes. Cooking time will vary depending on size and how many tomatoes are in your baking dish.

Freeze it! What to do with leftovers

My uncle and aunt were  in town this past week so we had more food on hand than we normally do and also had two dinner parties.  Needless to say there was a lot of cooking that went on for that.  My strategy is to have what I can done beforehand which makes life so much easier. But you can’t do all of it ahead of time.  And what do you do with all the extras that you end up with?

There is some of the new food stash.

They were here for about five days and in the end we ended up with way too many leftovers for the three of us to eat after the fact. Most of the leftovers were unavoidable, the normal pan size for us of lasagne or macaroni and cheese is not enough for five people.  For the dinner parties I would rather have too much than not enough, running out of food is a bummer, too much I can deal with that.  Some items such as the pork shoulder I made extra for sandwich meat that would be lunch the next day.  Cook once and eat twice, love it. We had leftover over fruit and cucumbers too that needed to be dealt with after they left.  The two casualties we had were the spring mix (almost didn’t buy it and didn’t use it) and the strawberries which we did use but not fast enough ( tossed about half of them).

So what did I freeze?

• Sliced peaches in 2 cup packets
• Mac-n-cheese in single serving lunch packets
• Chard risotto in 2 cup packets for risotto cakes
• 2 packets of rice, 1 basmati the other regular
• One roasted Hutterite chicken 4 packets 2 of breast meat and 2 dark
• Blackberries
• Polenta
• Cucumbers for smoothies
• 3 large packets of pork shoulder
• Pomegranate/cilantro sauce for pork
• Lasagne in single serving lunch packets
• Summer Meatballs for a dinner
• Two 2 cup packets of roasted tomatoes
• Chicken carcass for stock
• Cavapcici and ajvar  Ignore the picture with the recipe as that is not cavapcici.

We are stocked up for a while now and that feels very good. Plus I do not have food languishing in my fridge going bad and that makes me feel awesome.  What do you freeze?