CRISPY VEGAN CUTLETS WITH ROASTED TOMATOES

The tomatoes are coming in fast and furiously, from our garden and from the gardens of friends. We have big ones and little ones, red ones and yellow ones. We're eating them on salads, in sandwiches and many other dishes, but it's hard to keep up.  Yesterday, I slow-roasted a small tray of tomatoes of various sizes and varieties and knew I could do something with them for dinner that night.

If you've never slow-roasted tomatoes, cut them in half horizontally if round, lengthwise if the long paste type.  Cover your rimmed baking sheet with foil and then with baking parchment.  Lay the tomato halves cut-side-up and sprinkle with olive oil and a little salt and unbleached sugar.  Bake at 250-300 degrees F for about 3 hours.  The paste tomatoes get a bit chewy, and the ripe eating tomatoes get a bit more juicy-- I had to cook the juicy ones for another 45 minutes or so at 350 degrees F.  Use right away on pasta or crusty bread or in a grain salad, or refrigerate.

For our dinner, I coated 2 of my homemade "chikn" cutlets (recipe in my book World Vegan Feast, but you could also use these new cutlets on this blog post) with whole wheat flour, dipped them in a mixture of nondairy milk with vegan sour cream whisked in to thicken it, and then coated them all over with panko (crisp Japanese breadcrumbs) mixed with Go Veggie or Follow Your Heart/EarthIsland  vegan Parmesan. (You can use any vegan cutlet you like, homemade or commercial; you can use soy, hemp or nut milk curdled with a little lemon juice for the wet mixture, if you like; and you could use GF bread or cereal crumbs instead of panko, and any vegan parmesan sub you like.)

You could pan-fry these in a little olive oil, or brown them in a 400 degree F oven, turning once, but I browned them under my oven's broiler, about 6 inches below the heat source, just spraying with a little oil from a pump-sprayer.

For the tomato topping, I drizzled about half of the roasted tomatoes with about 1/2 tablespoon balsamic vinegar and mixed in some chopped fresh basil.  I heated the tomatoes gently in the microwave and spooned them over the hot crispy cutlets, serving immediately.

Simple, but DELICIOUS!

Enjoy!