I know it's been awhile but I made oven-dried tomatoes!

One of the simplest, andbest recipes I have come up with is my sun-dried tomato recipe. They take forever, but are totally worth the wait, and I recommend making them the day before you need them so you have plenty of time to get them to the desired dryness. I don't dry mine out all the way because I usually use mine for sauce, but you can always go further, there really are NO rules, always remember :)Anyway, the first step is finding some ripe, juicy tomatoes, preferably romas. You can always use cherry tomatoes, but they are impossible to peel after they are done and you will end up with skins in whatever you decide to make. I pick romas because I think they are the best, and are the perfect shape to cut each one into quarters which help with keeping the shape consistent as well. These will be roasted for hours and it helps for them to be the same size so you don't get dried tomatoes next to juicy ones.

I always add garlic but there is no need to cut it up, just throw it in your bowl whole but crush it a little with your knife. The basil, on the other hand, I run my knife through a couple

times to help release the flavor. I also like to add the whole, thick stems because they are easy to pick out, and save the leaves for something else later. The stems are good for this because they have a lot of flavor in them that is usually wasted.

Next, you need to make a marinade for your cut tomatoes. I usually make a simple dressing with balsamic and red wine vinegar, (you can use one or the other if you don't have both), vegetable oil, salt and pepper, and maybe some honey depending on my mood - maybe some Italian seasonings. Depending on what the purpose of your tomatoes you can always do different seasonings.
Let the tomato wedges marinate for an hour at room temperature

until the vinegar starts to break the tomatoes down a little. Strain off the liquid and distribute the tomatoes and garlic evenly on a sheet pan, making sure not to have puddles of liquid anywhere. The liquid will burn and become this weird sticky black stuff that is really hard to remove from your sheet pan, and could end up ruining your tomatoes. Make sure all the tomatoes are positioned with the insides facing up, this helps keep them from sticking as well.

Set the oven for 200 degrees Farenheit and throw the tomatoes in - then wing it from there! Depending on what you are making them for depends on how far you want to take them. You can dry them out most all the way at this low setting but check frequently as the time gets longer, it would be horrible if you did all that work and in the last 30 minutes they burnt up.

No matter how long you bake them, make sure that if you want to remove the skins to do it around 1 and 1/2 hours and they will easily peeled off, as pictured above. If yo

u wait too long they won't come off.

I usually bake mine for 3-4 hours, which yields a still-wet tomato, but they are withered and still somewhat dried up. I like them because I can still cut them up and make a sauce and they aren't like the dried ones from the store that remind me of raisins.

Also, these are incredibly versatile, so change it up a bit after you try it a couple times. Tomatoes are in all kinds of recipes so think about making a batch of these and replacing your high sodium can of diced tomatoes. Even the reduced sodium ones have too much sodium!

As always, happy cooking and please let me know what you think of this recipe - although it's not really a traditional "recipe", I guess it's a "dish description" :). Anyway, LET ME KNOW HOW YOU LIKE IT!