ROAST TOMATOES & CHORIZO

Roast Tomatoes & Chorizo.

I think the time has come to have this discussion. Don’t you just love it? I mean, as if it weren’t enough that it is so tightly packed with enough flavours that I’m happy to eat it raw (don’t judge me), but it also has enough fatty pimentón oils (basically a smoked paprika) that you don’t even need oil in the pan before you fry it. And in my head, any ingredient that doesn’t require oil to fry it is basically diet food. Right?

So let me paint you a picture. You get home. You’re knackered. You want real food but you also want to watch something on TV so want to be stoveside for as little time as possibke. And lying in its oxblood toned reign in the centre of your fridge is a whopping hunk of Spanish sausage just ready to take the sweat off your brow and ease you into a fabulous sofa slumped supper.

And here’s how you go about it:

Preheat the oven to 180C before halving a few tomatoes. Place them inside up (is that even a term?) in a roasting dish before pouring over a little olive oil as well as some balsamic vinegar. Throw in a small handful of sea salt and oregano and slide in the oven for an hour.

Around 30 minutes into the cooking time, slice your chorizo and dry fry the little cuts in a pan until they start to express their paprika-esque juices. Once you have a panful of sizzling red pound coins (roughly 15 minutes) take the pan of tomatoes out of the oven.

Pour the chorizo slices – along with every morsel of paprika juice – into the pan of tomatoes and begin smushing everything around with a spoon to release the gutsy tomato juices. Hand rip a few basil leaves into the pan with another stir before sliding back into the oven for the remaining 10-15 minutes.

I will admit that I completely abandoned both table (and civil) protocol and slammed the pan on my coffee table, sat on the floor and just threw down with the gusto of a walrus with a fork. It’s a recipe I have repeated time and time again and is always one I keep on the back burner for any leftover chorizo I find just hanging about in the fridge.

But those moments are few and far between as 9/10, there’s never any leftover chorizo. Let’s be honest.