Recipe Reviews

Oven-dried tomatoes

• Even after forgetting to water it for 5 or more days, the cherry tomato plant is still producing tomatoes like crazy. We found ourselves with a "problem": what should we do with all of those tomatoes?
• I found a few different blogs that showed how to make oven-dried tomatoes. We love sun-dried tomatoes, but hate how expensive they are. This is a great alternative, and I read that people freeze these too. We haven't done any freezing yet, because we used up all of our oven-dried tomatoes, but I'm sure we will be freezing a batch soon.
• This is how I did it (copy-pasted from an email that I sent to my mom):

1) Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil

2) Cut the cherry tomatoes in half

3) Put the tomatoes in a bowl and drizzle them with a little (very little - if you put too much they won't dry/cook right) olive oil. Add a little pepper and sea salt. Then mix them up a little.

4) Put them on the cookie sheet with the cut side up (skin side touching the sheet/foil)

5) Put them in the oven at 325 degrees for about an hour. Some recipes say to cook them for 2 or more hours at 200 degrees. That will probably work too. After an hour at 325 degrees, most of the tomatoes were perfect. A couple of the smaller ones were burned... so maybe turning down the temp is a good idea? You just need to keep an eye on them.

Cottage Cheese Chicken Enchiladas

• This recipe was a 3-stepper. Here is a link to the enchilada recipe.
• The night before we had these for dinner, I made the chicken in the crockpot. I put a small chopped onion on the bottom of the crockpot, then added the can of diced green chiles (the enchilada recipe calls for a 7 oz. can). I used the equivalent of half of a package of taco seasoning mix (but I didn't use store bought taco mix - too much salt). Then I added 1/2 of a bottle of beer, and 2 frozen chicken breasts. I cooked it on low for 5 hours. When they were done cooking, it was super easy to shred them. Then I used a slotted spoon to remove the onions and chiles from the crockpot, and added them and a little bit of the cooking liquid to the shredded chicken.
• While the chicken was cooking in the crockpot, I made enchilada sauce. I was trying to avoid all of the salt in the store-bought canned enchilada sauce. I used this recipe. It made more than the 10 oz. can that the enchilada recipe called for, but I ended up using all of it in the enchiladas.
• The next day, I put all of the ingredients together and made the enchiladas. They were really good. They tasted even better as leftovers, and we had a lot of leftovers.

Polenta with Spinach, Black Beans, and Goat Cheese

• We have made this recipe since I was a 1L, and we both still really like it.
• It calls for 1/4 cup of sun-dried tomatoes, so we were able to save ourselves some money by using our oven-dried cherry tomatoes. Yummy!

Tomato-Cream Sauce for Pasta

• I was extremely underwhelmed by this recipe.
• E really liked it, but I didn't even want the leftovers. I wouldn't recommend it.

Chicken Parmesan Burgers

• We had these for dinner tonight. We made them on the grill.
• We used ground turkey instead of ground chicken (probably because of our previous bad experience with ground chicken).
• These were really good. Definitely an "E-style" meal, too :) He likes pretty much anything with a marinara sauce.
• Baby bellas were on sale this week, so we sauteed them and put them on our burgers. They were good, but probably weren't necessary if you are looking to save a few bucks :)