French Fridays with Dorie Rewind: Slow Roasted Tomatoes and Olive Olive Cornish Hens

Slllooooowwww roasted tomatoes packed in olive oil

I’ve been on a blogging hiatus, but I have been cooking! After the Southeast Asian dinner, I had about a pint of leftover grape tomatoes. Dorie’s slow roasting recipe is very easy: a bit of olive oil a bit of rosemary and a long low and slow roasting in the oven (I used parchment paper to line the baking sheet). Some of my tomatoes were very tiny and I think could have cut back on the cooking time by about 20-30 minutes, but overall they came out of nicely roasted; wrinkled and shrunk, but still somewhat juicy. The slow cooking intensified the tomato flavor and the rosemary was a subtle accent. The tomatoes that didn’t just get eaten right off the pan went into a jar topped with olive oil and stored in the fridge to be used in other recipes. Many of the other FFwD cooks have used these as toppings for soups, sandwiches, pizza, appetizers, etc. and I’m looking forward to having them on hand.

I also did a re-do on the olive olive hens. Some of you may remember that I over baked these the first time around, and for my taste, they were a bit dry. This time, I baked the olive tapenade seasoned Cornish hens for the recommended time at the required 500 degrees (Yes, this also required that we open the doors to air out the smoke!). In addition, both D and I wondered if adding more oil-cured olive tapenade would be too intense a flavor or would make a better dish.  I went ahead and used about three times the tapenade that Dorie calls for in her recipe and I LOVED it.  D looked over the amount of olives and passed on eating it. Probably a good choice on D’s part; the dark intense earthiness of the oil cured olives was evident in every bite and the high roasting temperature gave it a grilled flavor and crisp skin, while keeping the hen meat nice and juicy.

hee hee. my hen looks a bit exposed, but this was the best photo.

In addition, over the last week I cooked lunch for my co-workers so we would have something to eat at the day long database training last Wednesday [This is also the reason I have not been blogging or tweeting or otherwise social networking the past couple of weeks; the only screen I’ve been logged on to involves a lot of “fields” and “categories” and “service groups” and “taxonomy.” Feel free to give a shout out it you understood any of that. ;-)]  Next posting: soup and rice for a crowd, with recipes. Oh, and a heads up that the Italy fundraiser dinner (my last this season) is in a week, so expect a few more dinner diaries this week as well!

Most Fridays I post my FFwD results, but not every week. You can still get your French fix by following the Doristas here. The French Fridays with Dorie group is not publishing recipes. We all have a copy of Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan.Get a copy and join in the fun!