Twist on Tomatoes

First off . . . the title of this blog is fully credited to my friend, Lauren.  Secondly, this is NOT a food/cooking blog so I'm not entirely sure how I find myself writing about food AGAIN, but here I am . . . .

I'm not a chef.  I'm not even a really good cook.  I'm just a Mom who has to put dinner on the table every night.  I run out of ideas fairly quickly and I love my Funky Freezer Girls group, who make it easy to serve my family a homemade meal every night.

Tonight was leftover night at my house.  I realized after dinner last night that we had a lot of leftovers in the fridge, so I told warned my husband we'd be having leftovers tonight.  I ended up grabbing a handful of grape tomatoes out of the package and gave them to the kids as their side.  As I was washing the tomatoes I noticed that they were starting to turn.  I'm a huge proponent of "waste not/want not" so I tried to figure out what to do with about a pound of grape tomatoes before they went bad. I started thinking and vaguely remember something about roasting tomatoes.  I also wondered if that's how a "real Italian" would turn fresh tomatoes in to tomato sauce . . .

I did a quick search for "roasting grape tomatoes" and found several pages of recipes. While my husband was helping the kids get ready for bed I lined a cookie sheet with foil.  I spread out the remaining tomatoes.  I added all the garlic I had on hand (about 11 cloves), covered everything with olive oil and then sprinkled on salt and pepper.   In true Heidi fashion I didn't measure anything.  I preheated the oven to 425 and then stuck the cookie sheet of tomatoes and garlic inside.  I set the timer for 35 minutes.  About 10-15 minutes in my husband heard "popping" in the oven and opened the door, only to be greeted by smoke.  By then I was helping our son brush his teeth and my husband told me, "You're cleaning the oven after whatever you're doing in there".  Because I'm lazy and HATE to clean I went and pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven.  I poured any and all "loose" olive oil into a bowl.  I turned the oven to 275 and went back to helping with the bed time routine.

Once the kids were in bed I pulled my roasted tomato/garlic combination out of the oven and scraped it into my food processor.   Once the tomatoes turned into sauce I tasted some and . . . I swear I heard angels singing.

This is the first time I have EVER been THRILLED about something this amazing that I just threw together.  WOW!  I was really regretting the plate of leftovers I had just consumed because I could sit and eat that sauce straight out of the bowl all night. AMAZING!!!  I don't have words to describe the pure ecstasy I felt while tasting it.

Because my husband and I don't have a baby-sitter we don't have date nights. We might go out to dinner a couple times a year, but it's generally a quick meal out and we're home within 2 hours of leaving.  To compensate for our lack of "dates" I occasionally cook a really nice dinner for us after the kids go to bed.  I already told hubby that we're having a date night in tomorrow night.  I'm going to cook some pasta for this sauce and we're going to ENJOY!

I don't really have a recipe to pass on and I don't know if I'll ever be able to re-create the incredible sauce I made tonight, but I guarantee I'll be heading to Costco soon to buy a HUGE batch of tomatoes and several heads of garlic to make sauce and freeze, in hopes I'm able to replicate tonight's perfection!