Serious Eats: Recipes
Dinner Tonight: Roasted Tomato Lentil Salad with Crispy Shallots
It all started with a container of stunning multi-colored grape tomatoes. I ate a handful raw and considered eating the rest the same way, calling it dinner (maybe some garlic-rubbed toasted bread would make an appearance). But my guide was this recipe from Sprouted Kitchen, which instructed me to spread the rest of the tomatoes out on a sheet pan to roast, shrink, and concentrate until as sweet as candy. Which, I had to admit, also sounded pretty tasty.
Roasting tomatoes to concentrate their flavor is something I often do to improve tomatoes that aren't the best quality. But doing so with perfect tomatoes has an even more dramatic effect. Tucked into a sea of lentils coated in Dijon, goat cheese, olive oil, and herbs, they taste like everything you wish a sun-dried tomato would be with none of the bitterness. Sweet, salty, and tangy all at the same time.
While you could easily spread this salad out over some greens or a bed of baby spinach, serving it in a pita was sort of fun, and the perfect meal to eat outside.
