100 Recipes - #79-80 Roasted Tomatoes and Baked Cucumbers

[lillibet]

I recently read about baked cucumbers in Julie & Julia, and since I've been getting cucumbers in my farmshare, that seemed like a good thing to try. And I have this lamb sausage that I wanted to use. So I came up with this idea for a deconstructed baked gyro kind of thing.

I started with #79 Roasted Tomatoes, working from this recipe. I only used six field tomatoes, which was probably a little more than a pound, and I skipped the thyme and eyeballed the garlic, olive oil and salt. They turned out very nicely and I have six leftover to use in something else.

Then I made #80 Baked Cucumbers, working from this recipe. I substituted olive oil for butter, again eyeballing the amount; used shallots instead of scallions, because that's what I had on hand; chose dill as the herb and added a bunch of garlic. One could be clever and probably do these in the same oven with the roasted tomatoes, but I wasn't feeling that clever. When those were done, I mixed in half a cup of plain yogurt mixed with a little kosher salt and cracked black pepper.

While the cucumbers were baking, I put the lamb sausage on a baking sheet and let those bake--possibly too long. They turned out a little dry--those are some very solid, meaty sausages. But I had all this yogurt-cucumber sauce and that moistened them nicely. I served the tomatoes and sausage over the cucumbers, with pita chips that I toasted while I was cutting up the lamb. I'm not sure it was worth all the work, but it made a tasty meal and it's certainly something to do when you have too many cucumbers.

Thanks to muffyjo for being tonight's test subject!

Comments

[muffyjo]

I am still absolutely full. Lovely meal, thanks again!

[gilana]

I roasted some grape tomatoes using that recipe (minus the fresh thyme, since I didn't have any and herbs are stupid expensive, and with a shorter cooking time, which was part of the point of the small tomatoes) and am currently eating them chopped up on a bowl of Dave's Fresh chive pasta with some goat cheese (which I bought to make the roasted beets.) Le yum! Thanks for sharing the wealth in your experiment, I'm getting some great new recipes out of it. :)