Most everyone has participated in an office prank at one time or another. This is one of my more subtle pranks but am quite proud of it none the less. Long commute times and lack of sleep should never be factors in degrading the quality of a good OP as those of us in the business refer to them. Read Here.
10-1-06 I oven dried some for 8 hours. See below.
So what to do? You’ve stewed, sliced, diced, puréed, sliced and canned them until your fingers are pruned. I decided to give sun dried tomatoes a try. So after a few quick searches I came across this article on About. So I just sliced them in half, lightly salted and placed them on a card table out on my enclosed porch tonight where they will get plenty of direct sunlight. Providing they don’t turn into horrible slimey pools of tomato goo, I will post pictures of the drying progress here.
Here they are.
All 38. 38 tomatoes HA, HA, HA.
9/17/2006
Drat! I wasn’t too far off when I made the comment above about slimey tomato goo. The first and second full day after I placed the tomatoes on my porch they looked great. So I go out to take a picture today lovely, mold.
So this concludes my little experiment in food drying. Perhaps I will have to give it another try with a direct heat source or next year mid summer when there is more sun.
10/01/06
After harvesting a number of late season tomatoes I felt it necessary to dry a few by means of electric range.
This method requires 8 continuous hours of drying.
First I halved the tomatoes, salted and placed them on an aluminum lined cooking sheet.
Next I placed the sheet in the oven set to 200°.
The tomatoes slowly dried over the eight hour span.
Once, during this time I flipped all of the slices over to ensure that each had dried thoroughly.
Here are the slices after I had removed them from the oven. The cherry tomatoes unfortunately, burned slightly. The roma and Kellogs Strawberry did quite well.
I decided to quarter the dried tomatoes and place them in a bottle of olive oil with some dried basil leaves and sliced peppers- also from my garden.
