Tanning Tomatoes

Oh boy, look at me - too busy to write to you. You must have been starving since October 20th. Poor thing. It was a good pie though, wasn't it?

So this next food experience actually happened a long time ago... but I was pretty excited about it and I got rave reviews so I would like to share it with you.

My friend Kristen Stuart of Sacred Roots Yoga in Canmore held a fundraiser yoga class for the children at an orphanage in Peru that she was going to visit the following week. She asked Glowfood to help cater it, and I was stoked to help out!

What does one make for such an event? What would the kids in Peru demand? Something savory, obviously.
Remember all those nut butter stuffed fruit roll-ups that I made this summer for the market? I was thinking about those and it hit me like a ton of tomatoes - savory roll-ups - that's what I'll make!

So off to the over-priced specialty organics store I went to get really nice tomatoes and these other ingredients to make:

Tomato Herb Leather
6-7 large organic field tomatoes, seeded chopped. Place seeds in a fine sieve and drain juice into bowl. Add juice back into mixture, discard seeds.
1 small onion
a few sprigs of parsley, chopped
about 10 small basil leaves
a few sprigs of cilantro, chopped
3 tbsp olive oil
1 cup water
1 cup finely ground chia seeds
½ tsp sea salt
20 turns of a pepper mill

Put onion and tomato in food processor and puree.
Add the rest of the ingredients. process until well combined.
Taste for salt.
Spread on 3 dehydrator sheets and dry at 115 until dry to touch but not too dry that the leather is brittle.

Take the leather off the dehydrator sheets and cut into equal squares or rectangles. Fairly small, maybe business card size? I can't remember to be honest. My pictures aren't telling the truth.

Then I filled them with the most wonderful tarragon + green onion cashew cream, the recipe taken from Matthew Kenney & Sarma's book Raw Food Real World (best raw book ever, get it!). Lots of cashews and nutritional yeast pureed in a food processor with lemon zest, lemon juice and sea salt into a fluffy and soft paste. Yum! Fold in fresh tarragon and green onion and any other herbs that tickle your tomato leather fancy.

Roll the leather around the cream and tie with a chive or piece of cilantro... or parsley...

Feed to people at a fundraiser.