OH NO! Green Tomato Salsa

Last week, I was all excited about my tomato plants being reborn. Then I found the scourge that is the tomato hornworm running a refugee camp in my plants. So I hurriedly harvested the green tomatoes, because I certainly wasn't going to let the dratted worms have all the fun. If they can eat my underripe fruit, then by golly so can I.

The only problem is...I have never made anything with green tomatoes. I've eaten fried green tomatoes. I've even watched part of the movie on TV. But I wasn't sure about breading and deep frying sliced roma tomatoes. Very small, immature roma tomatoes. And my hazy memories of the movie provided no inspiration at all

So I poked around the internets, and found some salsa recipes that I liked. And then, I promptly ignored the basket of green tomatoes and itty bitty onions (that I forgot I planted and found growing around my tomatoes) for about 4 days.


That was until I made the chicken stuff a couple of days ago. As I was cleaning up the kitchen, I kept looking at that basket. And then I saw the bowl that had held the paprika'd onion and bell pepper, and it has a little paprika residue all around the inside. And then I looked back at the tomatoes and peppers. And then, finally growing tired of my obtuseness, my Kitchen Muse knocked me on the side of my head with my iron skillet and roared "ROAST THE TOMATOES IN THAT BOWL, DIMWIT".

Being smart enough to listen to my muse when she starts throwing around my heavy kitchen implements, I promptly washed the cutting board and started cutting things in happy abandon.

Roasted Green Tomato Salsa

20ish small green Roma tomatoes, halved
10 very tiny white onions (or 1 medium), chopped
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp ground red pepper
1/2 tsp ground chipotle pepper

*note - The Professor does NOT like spicy things, and I do. So I always start off pretty mild and then divide the salsa, spicing up my portion afterwards.

Preheat oven to 250F.

Put tomatoes and onions in an oven-safe bowl. In a separate bowl, mix olive oil, cumin, chiptle and red peppers. Pour over the tomatoes and onions, and stir to coat. Put in the oven, uncovered, for about an hour or until the tomato skins are shriveling. I love the taste of shrivelled tomato skins. mmm....where was I ?

Remove from the oven, and set to work with your potato masher. Or, if you like using your food processor, do that. I just hate to clean the damn thing. But I ended up getting it out because The Professor likes smooth salsas. Taste as you mash, and add more spices as you like. The Professor's portion of this was perfect for him, but I added another dash of each the red and chipotle peppers.

This salsa was completely unplanned, and since I was too lazy to go to the store and spend the $1 on fresh peppers, I just used what I had in my spice cabinet. But I'm going to try this next year, when I will hopefully have a little more motivation to use real peppers.