Bruschetta, by Someone Who CAN'T Cook


As the summer is drawing to a close, my 'Summer Bucket List' has started to creep up on me, with everything I have not yet ticked off haunting my dreams.  One of the items to achieve that I wrote on that relentless list, was to cook a new recipe.  This seemed like such a fantastic idea at the time - I absolutely love food, I'm interested in cooking and, as my boyfriend does 100% of the cooking in our house, I wanted to try it for myself!  I just didn't think about the fact that I really CANNOT cook.

Inspired by our trip to Rome at the beginning of the summer (read my post on Rome here), where I ate the most delicious Bruschetta I have ever tasted in my LIFE, I thought I would give it a go.  I want to document my cooking experience here, partly so people will know I wasn't lying when I said I cooked, and partly for anyone else who, like me, cannot cook but wants to try something simple and tasty! 

I just wanted to add a note about my cooking experience so you will understand where I am coming from.  I can make pasta (obviously not from scratch, but, you know, boil the stuff from the packet and add some pesto from a jar), toast is fine, baked potatos and salads seem to work.  But that's honestly about the limit of my culinary abilities!  So you can imagine how apprehensive I was about cooking, and not just for myself but my boyfriend too (who is a fantastic cook).  However my bruschetta turned out great, not perfect but really tasty, and it just goes to show that you really can achieve seemingly impossible things!! If any of this rings true with you, I hope my experience inspires you to try out this recipe - let me know if you do and if it works!

There are many options for making Bruschetta - you can basically choose whatever you want to put on it.  But here is what I went with, it's a pretty standard one, and this recipe serves about 2/3 hungry people.

Ingredients


Method
  1. Preheat oven to 230°C.
  2. Blanch the tomatoes.  This is basically what you do to peel the skins off the tomatoes.  Make a small and shallow cut, in a criss-cross pattern, at the top and bottom of each tomato.  Then add the tomatoes to a bowl of boiled water. Leave them in there for a couple minutes to let them get soft, and then remove them from the water with a spoon.  When the tomato is cooled down enough you should be able to easily peel the skin off and throw it away.
  3. Prepare the tomatoes.  Now, you want to cut out the stem of the tomato, and cut it into quarters.  Then, squeeze each quarter, so that you get rid of all the seeds and juice.  Once you have done this for all of the quarters, you can chop them finely into smaller pieces and place them in a bowl.
  4. Add the garlic, olive oil, vinegar, basil, salt and pepper.  Just add it all into the bowl with the tomatoes, saving 1 clove of garlic for later, and mix it all together.  Make sure the garlic and basil leaves are chopped up really finely, and you can really add as much olive oil and vinegar as you prefer - about 1 Tbsp of olive oil and 1 teaspoon of vinegar.  Add salt and pepper to taste.
  5. Prepare the bread slices.  So I chopped my ciabatta roll into slices - I kept my slices about 2cms thick. Then I lined a baking tray with aluminium foil and placed the bread slices in rows on that.  I baked them at 230°C for about 5 minutes until they were golden - keep a very close eye on them (mine got a tiny bit too brown around the edges...)
    Once they were baked, I cut the extra clove of garlic in half in half, and rubbed it over one side of each bread slice.  This gives a really nice extra garlicy flavour.  I then poured a generous amount of olive oil into a little cup, got a brush (the kitchen kind, not the hair kind) and bushed each bread slice with the olive oil.
  6. Build the ciabattas.  I was now ready to arrange my bread slices on a nice serving board, spread each one with rocotta and toped it with the tomato/garlic/basil mixture. Then, I took pictures :)

That's it!  It's super simple, nothing fancy I know, but really delicious; perfect for an early evening appetiser or for parties, and we both really loved it! And you can be proud of yourself for trying something new in the kitchen :)

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