“Set it and forget it!”  This tagline always makes me think of seriously dangerous cooking techniques, like putting a can of soup in the oven and not remembering it until it explodes, or letting the kids take the new deep-fryer out for a spin: cooking strategies that just aren’t worth the convenience.  I want to be intimately involved in my cooking, even if only to prevent myself from burning the house down, so I’m always a little suspicious of recipes that rely on the aforementioned principle (and kitschy TV slogan).

I had to call a culinary-minded friend to see if I was “allowed” to leave the house while beef chunks braised in the oven for beef stew last winter.  Flush with the success of my beef-braising, I accidentally roasted a head of garlic to a slow, blackened death when I forgot all about it in the oven.   I often lose interest in the onion-caramelizing process because it takes so damn long and end up with sad, crunchy onion ghosts.  “Set it and forget it!” just isn’t for me, because it requires me to stifle both my impatience and my neuroses: no thank you.

So when the internet began to light up this summer with praises about slow-roasted tomatoes, I turned up my nose and retreated into my world of dessert.  After a marathon few weeks of baking, I realized that I was out of flour, sugar, and butter (no, seriously), and decided it was time to break back into the world of savory.  The $3.99/pound on-the-vine tomatoes at PCC, which cost as much as their oblong (and significantly less delicious) cousins the Roma tomatoes, were a no-brainer.

I pretty much think that tomatoes in July are a Platonic ideal of vegetables (okay, fruit): once, a ripe summer tomato even convinced me to go to Whitman College, but that’s a story for another time.  I didn’t want to do much to cover up the flavor of my plump, beautiful tomatoes, but I figured I’d slice ‘em, grease ‘em, and park ‘em in the oven at the advice of many a trusted food source (like here) and see what I got.  I had time to spare, and this took about three seconds of prep time and six hours of “are they done yet?  How about now?”

Did you know that reducing a sauce, which means to heat so the water in the sauce evaporates, concentrates its flavors and gives it a fuller body?  Consider this reducing a tomato.  You’re not sun-drying here, but instead heating them just enough that their skins constrict and a pool of madly flavorful tomato-ness settles in their middles.  They’re savory and rich, and basically the world’s joke on vegetables: great on hamburgers, or bruschetta, or for making tomato sauce with, or for eating straight if your name is Katie Phelps.  I fully believe that their goodness is so unparalleled that it will even convince the other half of this blog to see tomatoes for what they really are: deeeeeeeeelish.

Having successfully completed this recipe (if you can even call it that) over two times, I knew I was a lean, mean, roasting machine and was ready to kick it up a notch.  Before I went to bed last night, I sliced up my tomatoes, laid them in a baking dish, spread a little olive oil and salt on them, and prepared to outsmart my oven.  I busied myself figuring out if there was an auto shut-off for my oven (there is!) and set it for six hours.  Not that the sweet-salty smell of slow-roasted tomatoes was what I wanted to wake up to, but I’m a busy girl and I gotta get the cooking in where I can.  I fell asleep dreaming of infomercials.

I was rudely awakened exactly 6 hours later by what can only be described as a triumphant beeping.  In my bewildered state, I decided going back to sleep was worth the lives of everyone in my apartment building, but the noise persisted.  I was pretty sure it wasn’t the fire alarm, but my judgment was impaired by the hour, so I roused myself and went to see what the hell was going on at 4am.  Turns out my oven can automatically shut off, but not without beeping indefinitely to let you know how proud it is of itself.  Robots suck.

So I’m back off the “Set it and forget it!” lifestyle: turns out consciousness should go with cooking after all.  “Set it and forget it!”  Unless it won’t let you.

Slow-roasted tomatoes

Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

2-3 pounds of tomatoes, any kind will do (this is anywhere from 6-10 tomatoes)

Olive oil

Salt

Preheat your oven to 250 degrees.

Put a few glugs of olive oil in the bottom of your baking dish and spread it around.  Slice your tomatoes in half, and lay them next to each other in the baking dish.  Paint on just enough olive oil to slick the tops of the tomatoes (I use a pastry brush, but I’m sure a spoon or even your fingers would work fine too), and put a few shakes of salt along each.  Salt will help release the water from the tomatoes as they roast so it can evaporate, leaving behind a more concentrated flavor of tomato.

Stash the tomatoes in your oven and then go about your business for the next 4-6 hours.  Refrain from leaving or falling asleep, or your oven will get mad and exact revenge with incessant beeping.  Remove tomatoes from the oven once their skins have shriveled but still look relatively juicy, and put them on anything you can think of (except cereal: that would be pretty gross.  Though I did just find a recipe for a sweet tomato tart with brown sugar and puff pastry which relies on this technique, which is probably either disgusting or irresistible.  Stay tuned).

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