A Bruschetta Weekend

Carrie and I had bruschetta for lunch on both Saturday and Sunday.

It's very important to start off with fresh high quality ingredients when making bruschetta. In this picture you see some of the tomatoes that we used.

We bought the tomatoes at Trader Joe's because they have very good produce. We also purchased the basil, garlic and cheese there as well as the bread we used on Saturday.

The batch we made on Saturday didn't have quite enough garlic in the butter and the basil needed to be pushed a little harder too. Fortunately we had plenty of both ingredients on hand and used more on Sunday.

Even so, the bruschetta was very tasty on Saturday and we had no problem finishing off the 24 pieces in a very short time.

This picture shows the tomatoes after being sliced up.

Two teaspoons of fresh basil have been added and the mixture has been coated with a few tablespoons of olive oil. The bowl goes into the fridge to blend the flavors for a half hour or so.

While the tomatoes are cooling their heels in the fridge it's time to make the garlic butter.

We just melted a stick and a half of butter in a small saucepan and added 2 cloves of garlic, lightly smashed. On Sunday we upped that to 5 cloves and probably could have made it 7 or 8 even.

You don't want the butter to get too hot else the garlic will taste bitter so just keep an eye on the pan. If it boils, quickly back off on the heat. We let the pan go for 20 minutes but it doesn't need to stay on that long.

Now slice up some bread, preferably something long and narrow like a French baguette, and make the slices kinda thin. Say around 3/4 inch.

Dunk the bread in the garlic butter or drizzle some on top, sprinkle on some cheese, we used a Parmesan / Romano blend, and place under the broiler for a couple of minutes.

The result should look something like the photo here.

Now all you need to do is take the tomato mixture out of the refrigerator, add some salt, and spoon it on the bread. Eat while the bread is still hot!

The batch we made on Sunday, using more garlic and basil was just devine. We made 24 pieces again and never sat down. We just ate it quickly as soon as the bread came out of the oven.

We didn't exactly fight over it but you can be sure we were each counting how many pieces we were getting. It's fortunate that the number was even 'cause things might have gotten ugly if it came down to one final piece of bread on that plate.