We had a bunch of cherry tomatoes and I wanted to know what to do with them besides eat them raw. Actually I do a lot of things with them besides eat them raw, but I wanted a new idea... And I found this recipe. I found it here, but the blog post in question says she didn't follow the recipe exactly, and I guess neither did I. What follows is my modification. As usual, it's so simple that it hardly qualifies as cooking, but it tastes good.
Ingredients (serves 2 people generously):
two boneless chicken breasts, large
2 cups or so cherry tomatoes (basically a whole plastic pac from the supermarket, or blue cardboard carton from the farmer's market)
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp or so fresh marjoram
crushed dried chipotle pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
salt
pepper
Directions:
1. Remove any stems from the cherry tomatoes, wash, put in a big bowl.
2. Drizzle the olive oil over the tomatoes.
3. Chop the marjoram and sprinkle half over the tomatoes; reserve the other half for later.
4. Crush the garlic cloves and sprinkle over the tomatoes.
5. Sprinkle 1/2 tbsp or so of crushed dried chipotle pepper over the tomatoes; more or less to taste. Mix until tomatoes are thoroughly oiled and spiced.
6. Cut the chicken breasts into large chunks, 2 or 3 per breast depending on how big they are.
7. Put the chicken in a glass baking dish. Pour the tomatoes over and arrange them so that they're in a single layer around the chicken. Make sure the oil and spice mix drizzles over the chicken. Grind salt and pepper over the top liberally.
8. Roast at 450 degrees for 35 minutes or so.
9. Serve with the rest of the chopped marjoram sprinkled on as a garnish.
The recipe describes crispy chicken and caramelized tomatoes; what I got was really juicy chicken (but not crispy) and tomatoes that were shriveled but not yet caramelized. That was better, I think: they were juicy in a really concentrated way that really made the dish.
Careful with the chipotle pepper: I only added a little, probably less than what I describe above, and it came out nice and spicy. Next time I'll try it with the rosemary variation the blogger mentions, but I really liked the marjoram effect: it didn't counteract the spiciness of the pepper, but added a kind of aromatic halo to it.
We had this dish with corn on the cob on the side, and it was real good.
