Blistered Tomatoes

I've stumbled across a cheap, delicious, fast, practically calorie free side dish (and free on Weight Watchers). Sound too good to be true? Well, apparently it's not.

We love to buy the containers of cherry tomatoes from Costco, and they sell them in the plain red variety and also a multicolor heirloom mixture that has red, yellow, green, and even purple bite-sized tomatoes. My toddler loves them, to the point that we've even resorted to hiding them in the pantry or he'll drive us crazy wanting them all day. They've also ended up under our couch for reasons that still mystify me. We fancy ourselves salad eaters, but often the salad mix and tomatoes end up going bad before anyone can use them. I saw them sitting there the other day and thought, heck, why not.

I had just panfried myself some chicken breast with lemon juice, an attempt at a low calorie meal as I'm trying to get all this baby weight off. I gave my hot pan a quick spray of Pam, and threw in a double handful of tomatoes, and fried them until they were brown and blistered on one side then gave them a good stir. Toward the end I felt they were getting a little dry so I added in a couple tablespoons of water to sort of deglaze the pan. As soon as they started looking a little blistered and wrinkly (about 3 minutes), I added a half a teaspoon of minced garlic and salt, stirring a couple more times. The results were these wonderfully hot, flavorful tomato bites that burst in your mouth with the most potent tangy tomato flavor ever. They tasted similar to sun-dried tomatoes, but without the dry and leathery bit.

Feel free to experiment  by adding additional seasonings.  I tried adding Italian seasonings and it was delicious, a taste reminiscent of spaghetti.  Basil would probably be good, also.

This post was written by Kayte, but because she emailed it to me, it showed that I wrote it.