Looking for recipes with cherry tomatoes, or grape tomatoes, did not use to be a big part of my day. But I have learned that sauteed cherry tomatoes are a great side to serve with almost any main course, but my favorite is salmon. You can make a whole dinner out of this by simply laying down some greens, I normally use arugula, place your pan seared salmon fillet on top and then spoon on some of your tomatoes, and boom, dinner!
Again, like many of the dishes that I cook, there is nothing really fancy going on here, just getting some fresh ingredients chopped and prepped, and then a bit more time to cook it all. This recipe can take a long time, if you need it to, or a relatively short time if that is more convenient. Once you have your tomatoes and other ingredients chopped, they can sit around in a bowl while you get other things situated, or if you prefer, you can get everything right into a pan and to the table in well under an hour.
If I remember correctly, this is very similar to a recipe that I saw in one of Ina Garten’s cookbooks, but I don’t recall the exact title or the measurements of the ingredients, which is great since it allows me to not measure much of anything during this recipe. There are probably a lot of sauteed grape tomato or roasted cherry tomato recipes out there, but they all seem to be fairly similar. Find a tomato type that you like, add a few other ingredients that you like, throw them all together in a pan with some olive oil, salt and pepper, and what comes out should be pretty darn good! As long as you don’t burn it, this is pretty hard to mess up too badly. Famous last words, right? Try it out and let me know how it goes.
Pan Sauteed Cherry Tomatoes
Ingredients
- 2 pints of grape or cherry tomatoes
- chopped shallots or garlic if desired
- chopped banana peppers or peperoncino if desired
- 2 tablespoons olive oil
- Salt and pepper
- 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
Instructions
- Rinse tomatoes and then slice in half, stem to stem, and place in a medium sized bowl
- Add chopped shallots or onion if desired
- Add chopped or pressed garlic if desired
- Add chopped banana peppers if desired
- Add enough olive oil to liberally coat all of the tomatoes and season with salt and pepper to taste
- Heat skillet on stove over medium heat and add tomato mixture
- Stir every 5-10 minutes until the sauteed cherry tomatoes reach the desired consistency, about 30-45 minutes in my house
- Add about 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and stir
- Serve warm on top of main dish, or on side as a hot salad
Depending on how much your dinner guests enjoy tomatoes will determine how many servings you will get out of this recipe. For my family, I’ll call it four decent sized servings, though sometimes it gets reduced to three. But for the sake of determining nutrition values, let’s go with four. Also, as a big fan of olive oil, I am sure that sometimes I manage to splash a bit more in the pan than the two tablespoons that the recipe calls for. If you are likely to do the same, just make sure that you make a mental note that the nutrition numbers below won’t apply, and that most of the calories and fat in this recipe comes from the oil. But it is so worth it!
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