Roasted Tomatoes All Winter Long & Quest Explained

Last weekend I wrote that I would be going to Maxi Foods, which is the Hispanic store down the street, which I love, love, love. The produce is marvelous and follows what Leo and I call "the inverse rule of quality," which means that the lower the price of produce, the higher the quality, and vice versa, which is mostly what you will find in what I call the "big box" stores - Von's, Ralph's, Albertsons, Stater Brothers, and whatever else they are called in all the other parts of the country.

In my humble opinion, the produce, as a rule, in those stores is really awful. And expensive. Like a gold-digging woman (or man, I am a feminist) - all looks, no soul. And that is part of why I am on a quest to stay out of the big box stores. The other part is that I want to spend my grocery dollars in my local economy. I don't want to ship my money away from home by buying corporate groceries. And lastly, in addition to the quality and greenness issues, I want to explore as many other cultures of the world as possible. I call it teaching my children about the world through food, which will be a constant theme of moi blog to come.

But back to lovely, roasted, stored away in the freezer in darling little bags, tomatoes. I did two batches, two nights in a row. It is way too hot here to do during the day. To roast them I take the best, ripest ones I can find (fifty-nine cents a pound, take THAT, Ralph's or Von's, with your $1.50 a pound "sale" of ripened in the warehouse tennis balls). I also bought about 15 heads of garlic to roast at the same time.

To roast the tomatoes just cut them in half, and fill up a big roasting pan, or cookie sheets if you have the kinds that have sides (cut sides up). Cut a little off the tops of the heads of garlic and nestle them in here and there among the tomatoes. Now drizzle some good olive oil over everything. Finish with some sea salt and fresh ground pepper before popping in a hot oven (around 400) for about an hour. Some people sprinkle a little sugar, too, but I don't like the extra sweetness.

Let them cook an hour and then off the oven. Let them sit in the closed oven for the rest of the night. In the morning, slip the skins off over the pan (you want to save the juices and the skins) and store them in quart-size freezer bags. Store all the garlics in their own bag, too. Lastly, pour all the wonderful juices and the skins into another bag. Freeze everything. When it is winter and the sale tomatoes at the BB stores are $3 a pound, smile very smugly and take out a package of stored summer. Use in soups, or on pizzas, or in casseroles, or in roasted tomato and roasted garlic dip. Bask in the gorgeousness of roasted garlic which you can add to sauces, soups, vegetable dishes and more. Use the bag of juice and skins to flavor homemade broth that you will strain anyway. Could anything be simpler? Why do people thinking cooking is difficult? More on my theory about that on another post.