Gettin' Back To It!

So, I have been away for a bit, not that there are many of you following at this point (thanks to my dear sister for being my first and currently only follower!)...

Regardless, someday there will be more followers and we will all be able to look back at this post and laugh....

So I have been away for a series of reasons, but what I am most excited about is that I have a graphic designer at Etsy working on a new logo and blog layout for me. Hopefully I will have some great new stuff to show you soon!

So what did I do with all of nature's bounty I collected a few weeks ago? Full size tomatoes work great for making a sauce or canning, but it can be challenging to figure out what to do with a ton of cherry tomatoes. I found a recipe last year for slow roasting them in the oven and then freezing them and they really turned out yummy.

First, I cut all of the cherry tomatoes in half and mixed them with a generous amount of garlic, olive oil and fresh basil. I let them sit for a bit and then put them in all of the stoneware baking dishes I have. Then they looked like this...

Last time I did this I actually roasted them overnight. Two problems with that - now I have oven that really works and I didn't want to not watch them and two, it is kind of pain first thing in the morning to get them packaged and cleaned up while trying to get through the morning craziness of getting the kids to school.

This time I slow roasted them throughout the day, for about 4 hours at 250 degrees. I timed it so that they were finished right about dinner time so we are able to enjoy some that night and I was only cleaning up the kitchen and dishes one time.

This is how they look when they came out of the oven....

And here is a close-up of all their carmelized yumminess.

So what do you do with them now? I ended up with about 5 batches this time and 5 batches the second time. I used my vacuum seal thingy majig and sealed them and put them in the freezer. Now they can be used to put over pasta, with chicken, on pizza, to make bruschetta, whatever you can think of. I also did this with some red peppers.

I also used the sunflowers for an arraignment in an blue enamelware coffee pot. For filler, I actually used basil that had started to flower.

Too bad this is not scratch and sniff because it really smells yum...

Hope you are having a great day!