Delicious, delicious!

I love desserts.  If you put butter and sugar and eggs and maybe some flour together, I’ll be happy.  I love baking and nibbling.  In fact, I’ve discovered (after careful research) that I like the batter or dough better than the cooked version of any baked good.  Bread, cookies, pancakes, muffins, cake.  I’m actually salivating thinking about it.

I’ve taken to putting some batter in a little bowl so I can eat it with a spoon while I bake.  Mmmm…waffle batter.

I admit that I’m a little off-normal.

Bryan sometimes worries that I’ll eat so much batter and there won’t be enough of the finished product.  And to my credit, I don’t think that’s ever been the case (partly because when I eat a couple pancakes worth of batter I’m not so hungry for the cooked kind!).

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, I roasted tomatoes with garlic.  The intended use of these roasted tomatoes was a sauce for lasagna.  I had decided to roast some garlic cloves along with the tomatoes because roasted garlic is one of the best things in the world.

After roasting the tomatoes and garlic with olive oil, diced garlic, and oregano, I stood at the stove and used my teeth to squeeze the soft garlic cloves from their papery shell.  Heaven.  Then I plucked the tomatoes one by one from the roasting pan and ate them up.  Before I knew what happened, I’d eaten half the tray of tomatoes.  Then I ate another quarter.  It was lunch.  Oh, so good.

It might have been a little more civilized to have put the tomatoes on a plate and to have eaten them with bread or to have made some noodles and to have eaten them as a sauce over the noodles, but it was so nice to stand against the warm oven and pluck these little red beauties into my mouth.  One by one by one.

Our lasagna had to suffice with a can of crushed tomatoes as its sauce.

Now if you haven’t had roasted garlic, I need to help introduce it into your life.

Whenever you are cooking something in the oven, stick some oiled, unpeeled garlic cloves in there.  You can either serve them with the meal or use the cook’s prerogative to eat them all straight out of the oven.  You should probably share some with your spouse.  They’re too good to keep all to yourself:)

Here’s my recipe for roasted tomatoes and garlic:

Use whatever quantities you’d like – a couple bags of grape tomatoes and a head of garlic worked for me

• Halve grape or cherry tomatoes (so they are bite-sized)
• Dice four cloves of garlic
• Separate the rest of the head of garlic but don’t peel it
• On a rimed baking tray, toss the tomatoes with the diced garlic, a teaspoon of oregano, and a couple tablespoons of olive oil
• Use your oily hands to coat the unpeeled garlic cloves with oil and nestle the garlic in the middle of the tray
• Roast the tomatoes and garlic in the oven for 35 minutes at 400 degrees or a lower temp for longer
• When it has cooled, eat with your fingers while standing at the stove.  soooo decadent and good….

12-14-09 Update:  I made this recipe again with Roma tomatoes, and I wasn’t nearly as impressed. I ended up blending up the roasted tomatoes to make a yummy spaghetti sauce.  I think the sweetness of the grape tomatoes was a critical component for me!