It's my birthday! We're going to watch the presidential debate and then go out to dinner. In the meantime, would you like to see the feast I made the other night?

As you know, our garden is still churning out lots of cherry tomatoes and zucchini. That means we still need to use them up in quantity. What better way to do this than through roasting?

When you roast tomatoes, they melt into delicious pockets of goo. When you roast zucchini, the edges brown and crisp, while the insides turn tender. The end result is a pan of tasty bites in a pool of amazing tomatoey juice--perfect for soaking into a bowl of rice, couscous, or quinoa. Yay!

Roasted sungold tomatoes and zucchini

sungold tomatoes (or any other good tomato)
zucchini (or summer squash of your choice)
garlic
olive oil
salt, pepper

Preheat your oven to 350F/175C while you chop up roughly equal amounts of tomatoes and zucchini. I halved my tomatoes, since they were tiny cherries, and chunked my zucchini. If you have gigantic beefsteak tomatoes, you can chop everything into slices or wedges. It's fine to cut whatever shapes you want; the most important thing is to make sure that all your pieces are of similar size, so they'll all cook evenly. Put your vegetables in a casserole dish of your choice.

Smash a few cloves of garlic with the flat of your knife, peel them, and chop them roughly. Strew these chunks over your tomatoes and zucchini. Splash everything with a few glugs of olive oil, season with salt and pepper, and mix it all up.


You can see that my mixing skills were perhaps not the best ever. Oh well.

Put your pan of vegetables in the oven and roast until the tomatoes have collapsed and the zucchini is tender and browning around the edges. This took about 35 or 40 minutes for us. Rotate the pan once during cooking, but don't stir--to make sure the zucchini gets a little crispy on top, you want to avoid a complete soak in tomato juice.

Serve over the grain or pasta of your choice, and top with whatever you like best. I decided the best possible course of action was to strew the finished veg and juices over some steamed couscous and add a perfectly fried egg.

Hooray! A tasty and filling dinner that uses up a large chunk of garden produce.


(I have got to get a better nighttime photo-taking setup together now that the sun is down by the time we eat dinner.)

What last fruit (and veg) of summer are you rushing to eat?