Hollywood sun-dried tomatoes, part 2
I
posted earlier about Hollywood
Sun-dried Tomatoes
--- how much we love them, and how to dry the tomatoes in preparation
for the main event. Now it's time for the fun part --- assembling
the concoction. This recipe makes about 1 cup of Hollywood
Sun-dried Tomatoes.
Step
1: Put 3 large
cloves of garlic in the food processor and cover them up with olive
oil. Blend. (Yes, I can count. I figure those two
small cloves on the right equal one 
large clove.)
Step
2: Add about a
cup of loosely packed basil leaves to the food processor. Blend
again.
Step
3: Line the
bottom of your container with one layer of sun-dried tomatoes.
Step
4: Spoon on
enough of your garlic, basil, and oil mixture to liberally cover the
tomatoes.
Step 5: Lay down another layer of
tomatoes, another layer of goop, another layer of tomatoes, and so
forth, until you reach the top of your container.
Step
6: Pour olive oil
over your tomatoes until the oil completely fills the container, as in
the photo below.
Step
7: Put on the lid
and let your concoction marinate in the fridge for a few days.
The tomatoes will plump 
back
out and become infused with the herb flavors.
Alternate
Step 7: We
consider Hollywood Sun-dried Tomatoes to be a winter treat, so we toss
them in the freezer immediately after step 6. After they've
frozen, then thawed back out in the fridge months later, the flavors
have blended perfectly.
How do we eat the
Hollywood Sun-dried Tomatoes? Mark scarfs them down like potato
chips, but I like to save some for more serious cooking. A few of
these tomatoes act very much like a couple of slices of bacon in a dish
--- instant crowd-pleaser. Try them in egg salad, mixed with
pesto over pasta, or as a pizza topping. I usually throw the
tomatoes and a bit of their oil back in the food processor and whir
them up into little bits to make the taste go further, but you can put
whole tomatoes straight onto your winter sandwiches.
Our movie star neighbor
told me that the only flaw in his recipe is
that it requires so much oil, but I don't consider that a
problem. Once
you pull the tomatoes out of the juices, you're left with flavored oil
that will spice up just about any dish. If you can't think of any
other way to use it, try brushing the oil mixture over a piece of stale
bread and toasting it for instant, delicious garlic bread.
The real problem with
these tomatoes, in my opinion, is that there's never enough of
them. This week's bowlful of Martino's and Yellow romas shrunk
down into two scant cups of dehydrated beauties --- just enough for
birthday celebrations for two.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Never store garlic in oil at room temperature. Its low acidity and absence of oxygen provides a perfect medium to grow spores of Clostridium botulinum which cause botulism.
The biggest problem is that there is no easy way to detect that this has happened.
According to wikipedia, freezing alone is apparently not enough to halt the spores' development. The garlic needs to be acidified as well, or the mixture should be cooked in a pressure cooker for 3 minutes at 121 °C. You should not keep garlic oil in the fridge for longer than a couple of days.
Personally, I stopped making garlic oil after I became aware of this. Botulism is definitely one of those things you don't want to mess with.