How to Make Sun Dried Tomatoes

Hubby and I are not big fans of raw tomatoes. Yes, we know how good they are for us, and we try. Really, we do. We hold ourselves back from saying, "No tomatoes" in restaurants, and we make ourselves stomach them. Okay...sometimes we simply have to pick them off.  But the point is, we know they are good for us;  it's just so hard for us to eat them raw.

Once cooked, however, we can totally handle them. Heck, I'd even go so far as to say we really like them!  We especially like sun dried tomatoes, but those puppies are kind of expensive. Around $5-$6 for 4 oz of organic sun dried tomatoes. Yeesh!  

Did you know you can easily make your own sun dried tomatoes? Well, you certainly can. And if you get your tomatoes from the farmer's market for dirt cheap like I do, it's next to nothing to make them yourself.  I got a bunch of roma tomatoes for $1.20 at the farmer's market last week, I have a rosemary plant (bush?) growing on our back porch, and I already had olive oil. And that's all you need to make sun dried tomatoes yourself, so I got crackin! 

Here's how you can make them. You need:

roma tomatoes

olive oil

rosemary

Start by washing and halving all your tomatoes. Preheat your oven to 200 degrees.

Once halved, use a small spoon to scoop our the center, leaving yourself a little tomato boat. (Save those centers, they will go nicely in some pasta sauce or chili - or if you're braver than I, you can top a salad with them).

Place your little tomato boats in a bowl, drizzle with olive oil, and sprinkle with rosemary.

Then place the oily, rosemary sprinkled boats on your baking pan, scooped side down like in the pic below.

Bake at 200 degrees for roughly 6 hours and there you have it! Sun dried tomatoes! Once dry you can put them in a zipped bag in the fridge, or you can put them in a mason jar and cover them with olive oil and put the jar in the fridge (that's what I do).

*How do you use sun dried tomatoes?    

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