Roast-o-rama

I hadn’t cooked dinner for someone in a while. Jon apparently has left me for another woman, or perhaps he got tired of eating curry off the kitchen counter. So, to cook for someone again was nice.

This time, Mark came to my house to have a meal cooked in my relatively luxurious kitchen. The meal wasn’t so luxurious though. It was a usage of old food that needed to be eaten before I headed out of town again. And, the cooking was simple—roasting everything in the oven.

Slowly roasting tomatoes at a low temperature helps mask the blandness of tomatoes that are no longer blushing with summer freshness. The moisture evaporates to create a concentrated essence of tomato. The slow roasting helps bring the flavors of an otherwise sad tomato back to life. Not only do the tomatoes taste like tomatoes again, but the cooking of them is easy. I sliced the Roma tomatoes lengthwise, tossed them with a bit of olive oil, salt, pepper, and sugar, and placed them on a baking sheet cut side up. They stayed in the 300 degree oven for as long as it took me to finish the rest of the meal and for Mark to arrive.

The second sad vegetable for the evening were some zucchini squash that were at least a week old. I don’t remember why I bought them but they were still in the refrigerator when was doing some rummaging. They underwent the same cooking procedure as the tomatoes, except minus the sugar and not nearly as an extensive amount of time in the oven. They stayed in the oven for about 15 minutes, and came out tender without being mushy.

I also roasted salmon. The salmon was the only thing that hadn’t been sitting around the house for days, maybe weeks. The salmon was simply cooked too. The two filets were rubbed with a bit of olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper, and covered with fresh thyme springs from the herb pot. I squeezed the fish in next to the vegetables and cooked it for about 20 minutes. I left it in there a little longer than it should have been. It was just barely, almost imperceptibly a touch too dry. Mark said it was fine though, but everyone who comes over for dinner says my mistakes are fine.

The only thing that didn’t go into the oven was the wild rice. That went into the rice pot. I had a hard time gauging the right amount though, and ended up with three times as much rice as I wanted. The rice, however, came out well, unlike my last rice mistake. The grains were tender and chewy, and looked beautiful in their different mélange of shapes and color tones.