Besides the luxury of being able to go out my side door daily and harvest my own organic greens, beans, squash, and tomatoes, this has been the first summer that I've been able to indulge in one of my absolute culinary weaknesses.

I'm speaking, of course, of sun-dried tomatoes.

I've never had enough tomatoes to justify drying any. As soon as they were ripe, they were picked and eaten on sandwiches or salads, or plucked from the vine and eaten on the spot. While we haven't yet reached zucchini status with the tomatoes, we are starting to harvest way more tomatoey goodness than we can eat.

So, today, I whipped up a batch of sun-dried tomatoes. You don't need the sun. An oven will do the job just fine. Here's how I did it:

Step 1: Get yourself some tomatoes, and some fresh basil doesn't hurt either. These are 'Costoluto Genovese' and 'San Marzano' plums, but any tomato will do.





Step 2: Slice the tomatoes. Plum tomatoes work well sliced in half lengthwise. For the 'Costoluto Genovese,' I sliced them about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick.





Step 3: Arrange them on a cookie sheet, about 1/2 inch apart. Sprinkle with coarse salt, pepper, and a teensy bit of sugar. If you've got basil (or any other herb you like!) go ahead and sprinkle some of that on, too. Put the tray in the center of a 250 degree oven. Drying time will take anywhere from about an hour and a half to six hours. Mine took a little over four hours, because it was a pretty humid day. They're done when they stop gushing juice and the edges are curled up a bit.




Step 4: Remove them from the baking sheet, and let them cool completely on a wire rack. When they're cool, they'll have a kind of leathery consistency----not "dry" at all, really. You can put them in a jar with a little olive oil, and keep it in the fridge for about a week. Or you can seal it in any airtight container and store it in the freezer for up to six months. Which is exactly what I did with these darlings.

What are these good on? Homemade pizza, pastas, salads, sandwiches....one of my favorite pasta dishes is nothing more than a little garlic-infused olive oil tossed with some chopped sun-dried tomatoes, basil, and black olives, and sprinkled with a little parmesan. Delicious!

Ah. We gardeners enjoy so many little luxuries. And to think that it just looks like "work" to non-gardeners! We are SO lucky