Passport & Plate - Bruschetta
Italy | Thursday, March 13, 2014 | 4 photos
Ingredients
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
5-6 cloves garlic, chopped finely
3 vine tomatoes
1/4 cup sundried tomatoes
10 large basil leaves, chopped
salt
crusty bread
How to prepare this recipeServes 6 as an appetizer, 4 slightly hungry guests, or a ravenous pair.
1. Line the bottom of a serving bowl with chopped garlic, and cover with extra virgin olive oil. Let this marinate unrefrigerated for at 2-3 hours. This will take the bite out of the garlic.
2. Empty the vine tomatoes of seeds and juice, and dice up the tomato flesh. Add to the marinated garlic.
3. Dice the sundried tomatoes and add this and chopped basil to the mix.
4. Lightly salt the whole dish, and adjust as preferred.
5. Mix with a soup spoon, from the bottom of the bowl up, to mix all of the ingredients evenly.
Serve with crusty bread, and cheese makes a nice optional addition. (Mozzarella and dill havarti are my favorites.)
The garlic in this dish will keep dinner guests honest - I suggest that everyone shares.
The story behind this recipeIt’s a truth universally acknowledged that bread in possession of a crusty exterior and a soft middle is in want of some good olive oil. And if there’s anything we had in abundance when I was growing up, it was these things along with tomatoes and garlic.
Daily dinnertimes of my childhood went something like this: While we waited for the main course to finish, Dad would slice a bit of the crusty loaf from the table and widen his eyes at me mischievously. He drizzled olive oil on the bread and topped with tomato debris, crushed raw garlic and a dash of salt. We’d sneak our private antipasto in the still quiet kitchen, savoring the slightly sweet and salty treat, with its garlic bite and the occasional burst of concentrated tang. In the background meatballs thick with parsley and garlic sizzled and red sauce simmered, or spinach held onto its last moments before surrendering to the steam of a covered chicken Florentine. We’d enjoy the same tomato + bread snack later, as we sat around the table and talked for hours after it had been cleared.
My dad, the head of our family kitchen, never really did recipes. Precision still isn’t his thing. He suggests amounts (a pinch of this, a handful of that), and even ingredients (consider this from a recent email he sent me titled 'Pasta Fagiole': “Add some bacon, prosciutto or other cured pork thing.”). The recipe you see here is my attempt to capture the family staple that has kept me alive through the best and worst of times.
Through school and relationships, crises of work, emotion and barometry (hello, hurricanes!) – these ingredients accompanied me from crowded hovel to lonely studio apartment, and now the dish is on the permanent menu of the Motherless Brooklyn Thanksgiving I host yearly.
When I share this dish with all of the people I’ve gathered in my life, I hope it reminds them of where they have been and where they are going, and gives them a sense of belonging to something bigger, as it always has for me.
