Recipe 66: Roasted red onions and tomatoes

August 13, 2011 at 10:45 am | Posted in savoury | Leave a comment
Tags: Elisa Beynon, Sunday lunch, Vicars Wife

Summer has turned into that classic British mix of sunshine and showers: every day seems to have both glorious moments of sunshine and near-torrential downpours. All this makes meal planning rather tricky, and certainly makes outside meals a gamble! Last Sunday,  Richard and Ailsa came for Sunday lunch (and we were also joined by Dimity who is staying with me at the moment). I wanted lunch to be summery (as it could have been a scorcher of a day) but also sufficiently robust if it was a damp squib day.  So I decided to cook some pork chops (from the supermarket, but from the “quality” sub-brand and outdoor reared therefore being pork with flavour, not cheap pork which has no flavour at all and only the texture marking it out as porcine protein) and alongside it was a perfect opportunity to try out the roasted red onion and tomatoes recipe from the Vicar’s Wife Cookbook. Admittedly roasted vegetables don’t really need a recipe, but this was a combination that I had not tried before…. so helpful to have Elisa Beynon’s prompting to try something different.

Making it: Really simple. Quartered some red onions, chopped some tomatoes in half. Sprinkled over some garlic and basil oil (one of Waitrose’s brilliant flavoured oils). Shove in a hot oven for about 30 minutes. Finally added a big splosh of balsamic vinegar and then put it back in the oven for another 5 minutes.

Eating it: we ate inside (I wanted to eat outside, the others were more sceptical – and they were wise – as after lunch was dished out – it chucked it down!). The roasted onions and tomatoes were delicious: a lovely summer-y flavour (as if we were at an amazingly good BBQ – but without getting damp). The splash of balsamic vinegar deepened the taste and it worked really well with the roasted pork chops

Next time: perhaps I will get to eat it outside…. but there will be a next time as this is a great combination alongside some simple grilled meat. It would be great as part of a BBQ buffet, as it would taste still taste good having been out of the oven a while.